The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome Review: The Road From Ruin – The Wall Street Journal

This is a history of Rome in which the first name is that of Donald Trump and Ronald Reagans name almost the last. President Trump earns his place with his inaugural address promising to make America great again, President Reagan with a speech in 1969 on the theme of decline and fall in which the greatest empire in Western history collapsed in bureaucracy, excessive welfare payments, taxes on the middle class and long-haired students wearing makeup. Edward J. Watts, a professor of history at the University of California, San Diego, is a scholar of the later ancient world, who takes his readers from republican Rome to Republican Washington with a resounding theme that anyone promising to restore lost greatness is probably up to no good.

Throughout the years of his story he finds a range of cases where politicians first claim that society is becoming worse than it was during a great past and then suggest a path toward restoration that consists of rebalancing society to address the problems they identify. His modern abusers of history come from Spain and the Philippines as well as the U.S. When radical innovation is dressed as the defense of tradition he sees a trail of victimsimmigrants, dissidents and the young.

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The Eternal Decline and Fall of Rome Review: The Road From Ruin - The Wall Street Journal