By Curtis Craddock
When Odoacer forced Romulus Augustulus to abdicate as Emperor of Rome, in 476 the Western Roman Empire had effectively been dead for decades, ruined by bad luck and bad leaders. I haven’t counted, but it wouldn’t surprise me if most of the wars Rome ever fought were civil wars. None of the leaders involved in those disputes particularly cared about the Roman Empire writ large. The establishment of the empire by Julius Caesar was twice as far in their past than the founding of the U.S.A. is in ours. By the end they were just trying to hold on to whatever power they could get their hands on, and to hang on to the title of Emperor of Rome and the prestige that came with it. Kinda like winning an Oscar a hundred years after the last movie theater burns down.
As the U.S.A. enters what may be its final phase, when a plurality of a little less than a third of all eligible voters decided it would be a good idea to install a tumor in the country’s brain, I can’t help but think about how long the fall has been coming and what will come after.
The conditions necessary for the fall were mixed in to the cornerstone of the fledgling country all the way back in 1783 when the founders decided not to abolish slavery because they couldn’t bring the southern states on board without it.
In hindsight, they probably should have let the southern states go. But that’s an alternate history for another time.
Instead we kept slavery, and the preservation of the southern culture of white supremacy—The belief that only white Christian men are fit to rule— has remained the defining feature of American culture ever since.
The civil war was fought to preserve the union and only belatedly did the abolition of slavery become its central justification. Then, even when slavery was abolished, the old southern brand of white supremacy lived on. It triumphed when the north refused to prosecute Jefferson Davis or any of the confederate leaders. It triumphed with the return of those same leaders into seats of power in congress. It triumphed at the premature end of reconstruction.
So desperate were the leaders of the United States to get back to business as usual that the stitched the gangrenous leg of the south back on and allowed its infection to spread untreated.
Southern style white supremacy as expressed by segregation and Jim Crow laws remained the defining feature of American social and political life all the way up to the civil rights movement in the 1950’s and 60’s.
With the passage and enforcement of the civil rights act, it was tempting to believe that the disease of southern-style white supremacy as finally responding to treatment, but though the tumor may have shrunk a bit it never went away, it just went underground and kept on spreading, mutating to survive. It became vile talk radio shows and dedicated conservative news channels. It became the ceaseless mantra of welfare queens and illegal immigrants ruining the country.
When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008 and reelected in 2012, southern-style white supremacy seemed to some optimists to have been vanquished entirely. In reality, that event rekindled the supremacists. They were then too weak to operate openly, so they operated covertly, undermining laws, undermining social norms, taking over statehouses and judgeships until by the time 2016 rolled around, the Civil Rights Act lay in ruins and the country have been gerrymandered to the point where Republicans, having exchanged the values of Abraham Lincoln for those of Jefferson Davis, could control the country with an minority of the vote.
The Manchurian Cantaloupe became president and his tenure in office was in all ways disastrous, but by the time he was removed from office it was apparent that something was seriously wrong within the American electorate. The vote was close.
It should not have been close, but it was. The southern-style white supremacists, having fully captured the party of Lincoln, had mastered the art of disinformation in a way that their opposition did not and could not, and still has not learned how to match.
By the time the election was held in 2024, the Republican disinformation war had been so successful that facts became entirely irrelevant to the conversation. Only feelings mattered, and feelings are easily manipulated..
And so the citizens of the United States, in what historians will regard as a grand act of national suicide, reelected a cancer to lead them.
There is no doubt the Turd Reich will be an absolute disaster for the U.S.A., economically, socially, militarily, scientifically. The entire point of the project is to resurrect and impose southern-style white supremacy on the whole country, even if that means rendering the country completely non functional. In the minds of the people running this project, white Christian men must rule and everyone else must obey. In practice this means that the country must be reduced and diminished until it is small enough and weak enough for that particular cadre to control
Whether and to what extent they will succeed, we don’t yet know. What we do know is that every single person in Trump’s circle is a raging incompetent. They can destroy, but they have not the will, the desire, nor the ability to create. They got into power by gaming the system, by destroying the ability to argue rather than by winning arguments. They do not have the skill sets required to run a country.
They could destroy it though.
I can’t tell you what the next ten years are going to look like. America has never managed to escape its original sin, and that may be what kills the nation, our utter inability to let go of the idea that the deadly egos of white Christian men are more important than literally everything else.
What I can tell you is that today, fifteen hundred years after it fell, Rome is a city of 2.76 million people. It’s not the center of an Empire any more, but people still live there and have dreams there. And they still think of themselves as Romans.
In a hundred years people, will still be living in Los Angeles and New York. The world may be a very different place by then, owing to climate change if nothing else, but they will be as far away from this moment as we are from World War One. This hell we’re about to go through will be a footnote in the high school history texts.
One can only hope that those students do not read that history through the lens of southern-style white supremacy.
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