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Only the gods can answer that, now enough of this, lets go to the forum. I've heard that Tiberius Gracchus has some new land reform he's wanting to talk about.
Not sure what the point of this is. 'The Roman Republic collapsed, therefore the collapse of American liberal democracy must be near at hand!' What?
The collapse of the American Republic happened in 1861 when our own Caesar killed it. He died for his sins, but his enemies couldn't undo what he did.
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I feel much less clever and witty when I need to directly explain my points rather than obliquely make them with historical references, but very well.
The point of that post was to draw a parallel between the final stages of the Roman Republic and the modern era, specifically the moment before Tiberius Gracchus made the first moves in a long chain of events that ultimately lead to the collapse of the Republic. Mostly this was done to somewhat cheekily point out the folly of the quote I amended, demonstrating that it could readily be applied to a system that was about to undergo several bloody civil wars and "reigns of terror".
The Republic collapsed into civil wars and eventually gave way to the rule of one man at the height of its power and security. The catalyst for its disintegration was elites leveraging the disgruntled masses to further their careers battling against elites that sought to supress said disgruntled masses for their own benefit. I could go on, but the parallels are obvious, the USA is consciously modeled after the Roman Republic and has in many ways followed a similar trajectory thus far, it is not unreasonable to suppose that it might continue along that same trajectory.
Also I should say that the poster who you were replying to had a point, although I disagree with the idea that America is an empire (or that the Republic was truly an empire either). Power is a force and follows its own laws in the same way that natural forces do, there is too much power converging in Washington for it not to change the system that channels it. Much like the Republic, the US has gone from backwater to Hegemon practically overnight, in the case of Rome it turned out that a system designed to govern a leading city state could not survive the sudden pressure imposed on it by the near absolute power, time will tell how the US fairs.
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