Commodus, Nero and the Punk Next Door, or at the Gas Station or in Walgreens...

From Madison reading Cato and Cicero when framing the Constitution to the outsized impact both Rome and America had on the world around them, the United States has long been associated with historical Rome.  There are great similarities, and there can be much to learn. 

When most of us think of the worst emperors Roman in history we think of names like Commodus, Nero, Caligula and Elagabalus.  To a man they were vain, self centered, bloodthirsty hedonists who took what they wanted and tortured and killed many thousands of Romans and provincials. 

All emperors, including the great ones like Augustus, Trajan and Aurelian had blood on their hands to one degree or another, but most tried to maintain or grow the empire.  Commodus et. al. didn’t.  Their goal was to satiate their lusts, whether literal lust, or gluttony or sadly, bloodlust.  While there were other bad emperors, these four are among the worst.    

What makes this relevant today is the fact that all four of these “men” were spoiled, pampered, entitled sadists who were given free reign when they were still essentially children.  Commodus was the oldest at 19, while Nero was 17 and Elagabalus and Caligula were both 16. 

They were overindulged brats who never faced consequences for their behavior.  They were given virtually anything they wanted, or just as often, allowed to take what they wanted with impunity. And it was at those ripe young ages they were literally given the keys to the kingdom and unleashed on the Empire and virtually everyone in it suffered as a result.

Every day in America we see modern day Commoduses or Caligulas wreaking havoc on our streets and in our stores, restaurants, schools and more.  Instead of a single entitled Emperor, America in 2022 is being ravaged by a generation of young men – many of whom have grown up fatherless – who have been told that they can do and say anything they want and that regardless of what they do, there will be no consequences for them. 

Just as Elagabalus et al brought nothing but blood, despair and dysfunction to the Empire, these 21^st century youth are bringing blood, despair and destruction to America. A generation of Americans has grown up being given “time outs”, “participation trophies” and grades that have nothing to do with actual academic success, while at the same time they’ve been told that all inequality is due to racism or sexism or homophobia or anything other than individual choices or actions.  The consequence of this indoctrination is that far too many young Americans think they can do anything with impunity.  If they want something they take it. If they’re mad about something they protest, disrupt the lives of everyone within shouting distance and frequently riot.   They assault, rape and sometimes even murder, increasingly with impunity. 

Pat Moynihan predicted much of this 60 years ago in his “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action."  In it he “…described through pages of disquieting charts and graphs, the emergence of a “tangle of pathology,” including delinquency, joblessness, school failure, crime, and fatherlessness that characterized ghetto—or what would come to be called underclass—behavior.” 

While most of the scenes of flash mobs, carjackings, Knock Out Game punches, subway shovings and daily shootings involve black male youth, this is not a race issue.  Yes, the problem is disproportionately black, but white and Hispanic America is increasingly experiencing the same challenges of unwed mothers, school failures and the lack of responsibility that underpins much of the dysfunction.  Whether a California college student getting 6 months for rape, a Texas boy getting no jail time for killing four people in a car crash or charges being dropped against a South Carolina boy for killing someone in a boat crash, unaccountable America spans across races, wealth, and indeed the country itself.  This is nowhere better demonstrated than by the legions of rioters who participated in the “peaceful protests” of 2020 who found their charges dropped or their bails funded by the glitterati.   

These unrestrained youth highlight the existential threats to America today:  The lack of accountability and individual responsibility.  To the degree that America’s leaders have spent more than a generation telling youth they’re nothing more than products of others’ malevolent thoughts and actions and are not responsible for their own actions, they shouldn’t be surprised at the carnage we see across the country.  To the degree that single mothers and schools and increasingly DAs across the country are not holding youth accountable for their transgressions, they should not be surprised by the blood on their streets, the boarded up shops in their neighborhoods and the flight of families seeking safety and security. 

Since its beginning America has been a nation governed by the Rule of Law as opposed to the Rule of Man. Imperfect and sometimes unequal in its application, America’s Constitution has successfully guided the behavior of government (mostly) for more than two centuries and in doing so guaranteed citizens freedom and the prosperity freedom cultivates.  But that framework only works when citizens feel confident that justice and the laws are applied equally, or mostly so. When citizens begin to recognize Orwell’s “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others" in their daily lives and on their streets and on their television screens, the civilization’s days are numbered.  Which is exactly what Americans are seeing today…

Nero, Elagabalus and the rest of that youthful cohort showcase exactly what happens when young men learn that accountability doesn’t apply to them.  When people aren’t held responsible for their actions, many will act accordingly, without restraints, unleashing a torrent of violence, excess and depravity that tears at the fabric of a civilized society. 

Which is exactly where America is in 2022.  If the country remains on its current path, one of coddling youth and ever increasing cries of victimhood combined with the acceptance of rampant crime, ubiquitous homelessness and public drug abuse as the price of addressing “inequality”, it will lead to an acceleration of the breakdown of civilization.  As more citizens feel like they cannot rely on government to provide security and enforce societal norms, they will increasingly take matters into their own hands. They will look for vigilantes like a Charles Bronson character to step into the gap, or more likely, many will choose to arm themselves as they increasingly feel they need to become the next Bernhard Goetz. But 2022 America is not 1994 New York… indeed it’s worse.  Thugs are bolder, crimes are more widespread, and most of all, today everyone feels vulnerable because they see videos of horrific crimes every single day, often in the parking lots of stores they frequent, at the gas stations where they fill up or in the subways they ride every day.  That’s a powder keg filled with 100 million armed Americans who are tired and frustrated and feel let down by a government that no longer cares about them.   

Unlike the citizens of the Roman Empire, who were often stuck with whichever murderous psychopath emerged from the carnage to don the purple, Americans have an opportunity to guide their own society in ways that don’t involve assassination or subterfuge or armies marching against one another. We have the ballot box. We have recall petitions.  We have school board meetings and the right to peacefully protest – or at least we used to.  But… will the political and “elite” establishment listen, or will they continue to turn a blind eye to the calls for a return to a civilized society? Blood is already spilling.  The question is, will we get less of it or more?  The ideal is less.  But if the answer is more, the question becomes, whose will it be?  And who will do the spilling? 

The Left Sacrifices Actual Greatness for the Illusion of Perfection

In 1776 56 men signed the Declaration of Independence and thus began a war with Britain.  When the war was concluded in 1783 American casualties would number 25,000 dead and 25,000 wounded.  Those 50,000 casualties paid the price so that a new nation, founded on the ideas of freedom and liberty, could take its place among the nations of the world. 

Eighty five years later the United States was at war with itself and eventually 360,000 Union soldiers gave their lives to extend that promise of freedom and end slavery.  Seventy five years later 405,000 Americans would die in an effort to save freedom from tyranny on two continents. 

Over the course of almost 250 years approximately 1 million American men gave their lives in defense of freedom, the vast majority of which were volunteers.  While their individual reasons for enlisting were likely as varied as their life stories, all made the decision that the nation was worth fighting for and indeed dying for if necessary.

Over the lifespan of our nation those million men sacrificed their lives and tens of millions of others put theirs on the line to defend the ideals set out in the Declaration of Independence and codified in the Constitution.  And despite the current crop of leftist brass leading the Pentagon, most servicemen and veterans are and have been extraordinary patriots.  But here’s the thing, America has been so incredibly successful in fostering peace around the world, been so extraordinarily successful in crafting the prosperity at home that relatively few modern day Americans ever have to bother putting on the uniform in the first place, nevermind actually fighting in a war in which they are asked to risk their lives. 

Most of those on the left who tell us that America is a fundamentally racist nation have never had to serve in a military environment, one of the most colorblind elements of American society.  No, most of them are pampered college educated agitators with very little skin in the game in terms of doing anything productive at all, not protecting the nation, not building the nation, not improving the nation. Others are minorities who have listened for years to grifters selling the fiction of serial victimization.  They attack the United States for not being the nirvana that Marx wrote about or the racial paradise Nikole Hannah-Jones pretends Cuba is.  (Ironically, Marx, a chronically unemployed writer who was perpetually supported by Engles, scion of a wealthy family with textile interests, spent his time theorizing and critiquing capitalists… including textile manufacturers… Similarly absurd, the nirvana we are told is Cuba is is today wracked with civil unrest as the poverty stricken population revolts against 70 years of communist oppression.)

Few on the left have life experiences that would enable them to understand the United States for what it really is… an imperfect nation with extraordinary goals where citizens have enjoyed unprecedented freedoms and achieved unparalleled prosperity.  Most of them have been indoctrinated into the mindset that defines the United States by its worst failures, never to be mitigated by its overwhelmingly more common successes.  Slavery and Jim Crow were indeed dark marks on America’s history, but a civil war to end the former and more than half a century of laws, programs and expenditures to overcome the latter count for nothing to redeem the nation. 

That is a hallmark of the left, like Marx… little experience but lots of ideas. How many modern leftists risked their lives for their country?  Probably not a lot.  How many of them risked every penny they had (or more) to start a business and find themselves forced to walk on the tightrope between paying the landlord, suppliers, and making payroll, all while trying to market their product, fight off competition and jump through a leviathan of regulatory hurdles?  Again, woefully few.  How many of them worked on a factory floor or an oil rig or were plumbers or welders or janitors, as they sacrificed much to try and give their kids opportunities they didn’t have? Certainly not many.  As America has became more white collar, more information centric and more focused on cheap imports over the last quarter century or so, many parents pampered and spoiled their children, creating an army of adult adolescents with few real responsibilities, rarely risking much of anything and even more rarely encountering opposition of any sort.

Which brings us to Donald Trump. One of the reasons Donald Trump was such a great president was that he was an actual businessman – granted, one who inherited much from his father.  But despite his father’s success, Trump was a successful businessman operating a real estate business in shark infested New York City, one of the most difficult cities in the country to navigate.  He dealt with New York’s kleptocratic regulatory boards, corrupt unions, and predatory banks all while focusing on making payroll, hitting deadlines and producing a product consumers would exchange their hard earned money for.  Donald Trump is not some Wall Street genius making billions by selling obscure financial products to giant retirement funds, nor is he a Silicon Valley prodigy who sold some selfie app to Facebook or Google. He’s a businessman who builds actual things.  At the same time he’s not some academic savant living in an ivory tower with no communication with the real world, a “journalist” with tunnel vision nor a Hollywood puppet speaking someone else’s words for a living, while flying around on private jets and living in mansions protected by ex Mossad agents. 

Trump may have the planes and the mansions and the security, but his words are his own and he is very much a man of the people.  In what was possibly the single most accurate tweet of all time, Trump said:  “In reality they’re not after me. They’re after you, I’m just in the way.” And that’s the key to all of what’s going on in America today.  The digital revolution, social media and government handouts have fundamentally transformed America from a hardscrabble place where people rolled up their sleeves and built tangible things, grew or extracted an income from the ground and signed up to defend their nation to one with overindulged snowflakes where virtually everything is digital, business is little more than delivering things built somewhere else by someone else and government largesse that makes actual work seem like a sucker’s game.

America today is allowing itself to be destroyed by groups of people who neither share its values nor its understanding of what’s necessary to build or defend a successful nation in the real world.  They, much like their gods, Marx, Sanders and Hannah-Jones, live in ivory tower worlds where virtually everything is theoretical because none of their ideas actually work in the real world.  They never concern themselves with building anything, improving anything or designing anything that actually survives an encounter with the real world. When you operate in the universe of ideas, everything is perfect because it’s never subjected to reality.  Much as the French learned at the end of the end of the 18^th century, such theoretical perfection rarely survives exposure to the kilns of actual life, and giving the reins of society to simpletons who invoke such perfection is the fastest road to abject failure.