Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America

In the new book Are We Rome?: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America, Cullen Murphy, former managing editor of Atlantic Monthly, draws some striking parallels between ancient Rome and modern day America and raises issues that beg our consideration.

Here are a few of them as presented by Gary Kamiya of Salon.com:

(Among the similarities between Rome and America) Murphy cites massive privatization and its attendant sins, corruption, the loss of faith in government and the degradation of civil society. To my mind, this is the most original and compelling part of his book. "Rome had trouble maintaining a distinction between public and private responsibilities -- and between public and private resources," Murphy writes. When this happens, "central government becomes impossible to steer. It took a long time to happen, but the fraying connection between imperial will and concrete action is a big part of What Went Wrong in ancient Rome." Similarly, "America has in recent years embarked on a privatization binge like no other in its history, putting into private hands all manner of activities once thought to be public tasks." Murphy says that "the privatization of power isn't a phenomenon of the margins, a footnote to history -- it's a central dynamic of American public life."

The result, he argues, is not only corruption, the what's-in-it-for-me mentality epitomized by the sleazy likes of Jack Abramoff, but loss of government's "management capacity." In part this is because private contractors don't answer to the same laws and regulations that government ones do; in part it's because government itself is simply vanishing. The loss of efficiency and command and control is bad, but still worse are the intangible ramifications of privatization: "the loss of civic engagement and loyalty across the board is a very real threat." Murphy declines to explicitly single out the Bush administration, and in a larger sense the small-government ideology of the Republican Party, as largely responsible for this trend. But that does not alter the fact that his book is a blistering implicit refutation of the GOP's anti-government ethos, and the still more degraded crony capitalism practiced by Bush.

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(Murphy argues that) America needs to "stop treating government as a necessary evil, and instead rely on it proudly for the big things it can do well ... The Social Security check every month, the safe drugs and highways, the guaranteed student loans, the heath-care safety net in old age, the sandbags when the rivers flood -- their inherent benefits aside, these things promote a sense of common alliance and mutual obligation that dwarf narrow considerations of 'efficiency.'"

We should institute a program of national service for all young people, "which would revive the militia ethic of long ago. 'We're all in it together' is a spirit that Rome lost."

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As the late Senator Paul Wellstone said, "We as a society need to be encouraging people to focus not just on individual wants but on serving the larger community."

(Watch Cullen Murphy's recent interview with Stephen Colbert.)