The current situation in the US is the stuff of bad dreams – according to polls and pundits, the country is likely at the end of its run as a liberal democracy/republic and headed toward a new destiny under an imperial president with fascist ambitions – all neatly spelled out in Project 2025.

This isn’t the first time fascism has threatened here – in the 1930s, extremist Huey Long was a serious rival to FDR to head the Democratic Party; Sinclair Lewis wrote the ominous warning It Can’t Happen Here; Charles Lindberg headed the America First movement; Father Coughlin preached his hateful anti-semitic gospel on nationwide network of radio stations; in February 1939, twenty thousand people attended a pro-Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden organized by the German-American Bund; …  .

Since its founding, the US has grown from a small nation into an imperial colossus, a process begun by the Louisiana Purchase, accelerated by the Mexican War and then by Teddy Roosevelt and the Spanish-American War.  Today the armed forces’ budget is nearly a trillion dollars and the US is an empire with military and economic clout reminiscent of the Roman Empire. In fact, the US has long been compared to ancient Rome. By way of example, Harold Macmillan, the British prime minister (1957-1963), was famously quoted as saying that “[America is] the new Roman Empire,” adding as a haughty imperialist would “and we Britons, like the Greeks of old, must teach them how to make it go.”

The Roman sphere of influence was much smaller, of course, than the global reach of the American military but by Cicero and Caesar’s time, the Roman Republic controlled the entire Mediterranean world and the Romans proudly called the Mediterranean Mare Nostrum (Our Sea). The Roman Army was the greatest fighting force the world had known and it was kept busy putting down revolts and resistance in places as far apart as Palestine and Great Britain while it kept pushing the boundaries of the empire ever further out. And they had the Pax Romana as we now have the Pax Americana. But at the same time, it was a period of growing social and economic inequality even among Roman citizens.

Unlike a classic empire with its emperor and all that, the US has been monarch-free for well over 200 years now – a record bested in the Western World only by tiny San Marino. For its part ancient Rome was monarch-free from the founding of the Republic in 509 BC to 27 BC when Augustus became emperor.

But the transition from Roman Republic to Roman Empire was not simple and played out over a period of time. Indeed, the Republic was threatened earlier in that first century BC; a civil war led to victorious general Lucius Cornelius Sulla’s being named Dictator in 82 BC, a position which he used to draw up proscription lists of enemies and rivals to be dispatched with. Soon after, in 63 BC, after losing the election for Consul (chief of state), Catiline (Lucius Sergius Catilina) began a conspiracy to take over Rome by force. Marcus Tullius Cicero (as Consul) exposed the threat posed by Catiline and his co-conspirators in a sequence of four orations known, of course, as the First Catilinarian, the Second Catilinarian, the Third Catilinarian and the Fourth Catilinarian. (Sorry about that but this writer couldn’t resist resorting to anaphora, a rhetorical figure of speech dear to Cicero.)

The analogy between Catiline and Donald Trump is clear enough but when Trump and his thugs organized the attempted coup of Jan 6 (which led to six deaths, multiple injuries, panic among members of congress, significant multi-million dollar material damage, etc.) Attorney General Merrick Garland, the US congress and President Joe Biden just dilly-dallied and really did nothing about it; in contrast, when Cicero as Consul got wind of Catiline’s machinations (from Crassus of First Triumvirate fame, no less) he moved into action and the government addressed the issue quickly enough – in fact, Catiline and his thugs were pursued and done away with in 62 BC.

After his victorious campaign in Gaul, in 49 BC Gaius Julius Caesar broke the tradition of the Roman Republic by crossing the Rubicon River in Northern Italy with his army and marching on to Rome. Civil war followed and the ever victorious Caesar had himself declared Dictator for Life (Dictator in Perpetuum) in 47 BC; this was followed by Caesar’s assassination by a group of Roman senators which led to civil strife between the followers of Caesar, notably Mark Anthony and Caesar’s heir Octavian, and the Senatorial forces led by Brutus (“the noblest Roman of them all”) and Cassius (of “the lean and hungry look”); following Sulla’s example Anthony quickly prepared a proscription list of people to kill and, although he was not a conspirator, Cicero himself appeared on that list; next Anthony and Octavian’s forces defeated the Senatorial army of Brutus and Cassius at Philippi in 42 BC and divided the Empire between them with Anthony getting the richer eastern half which included Cleopatra’s Egypt. Not unexpectedly, the two half-empires came into conflict leading to Octavian’s victory in the Battle of Actium in 31 BC. Shortly after Octavian was renamed Augustus as he took over as sole Emperor in 27 BC.

Rome had been monarch-free from the founding of the Republic in 509 BC and so the Senate and the Roman People (SPQR) had stood for 482 years; it has long been argued that the end of the old Roman Republic was brought about by the complexity of governing the empire – something which a group of squabbling patricians was no longer capable of doing; something that required uncontested governance from the top down. Here the analogy with the over-militarized, class ridden, American state shows its relevance: are our political institutions up to the job of running the empire? To start, the Electoral College system which makes a vote for president in Wyoming have four times the value of a vote in California certainly raises questions. The Supreme Court is out of control what with decisions dictated by the Vatican, gun manufacturers, supporters of an imperial-presidency, … . Books are coming out that argue that the current US political structure is indeed inadequate for government in this new age – e.g. legal scholar Erwin Chemerinsky’s No Democracy Lasts Forever: How the Constitution Threatens the United States (August 2024).

Another aspect that is part of this picture is the hunger on the part of the population for a religious revival. Indeed, soon after the creation of the Roman Empire, early in the first century AD, two important new religions reached Rome from the East to help fill the void, viz. Mithraism and Christianity. Since the 1960s, we are seeing a serious, continuing decline in church-going in the Western World. History would suggest that there is a new religious revival on the horizon but we are getting ahead of ourselves. On the other hand, the two major political parties seem to be filling the gap somewhat by becoming intolerant rivals creating a situation reminiscent of the hostility between religious groups at the time of the Wars of Religion in Europe.

Although those polls and pundits are in the process of accepting the inevitability of a Trump victory on November 6, hope springs eternal – after all Truman did defeat Dewey in 1948.