No Republic is Eternal
What the Fall of Rome’s Republic — Long Before the Empire — Can Still Teach Us
Comparing the decline of America to the fall of Rome has long been an intellectual sport, played by everyone from serious historians to “end-is-nigh” preachers.
But most of them focus on the Imperial era, when the Empire began to crack apart — barbarian invasions, emperors driven mad by power, the long slide into the so-called Dark Ages.
That’s not the story we’re living. Not yet.
We’re not Rome in the fourth or fifth century. We’re Rome in the first.
The real warning comes from the slow-motion collapse of the Roman Republic — a system of checks and balances undone from within, centuries before Augustus took the throne.
That’s why I’m urging you to read Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell Into Tyranny by historian Edward J. Watts. It’s not a dry academic text. It’s a mirror.
Watts walks us through how the Roman Republic lasted nearly five centuries — longer than the United States has been around — before it was dismantled by the very people who claimed to protect it. He shows how political norms were eroded, how violence crept into civic life, and how citizens grew so tired of dysfunction that they willingly handed power to one man who promised order.
Watts writes:
“This book explains why Rome, still one of the longest-lived republics in world history, traded the liberty of political autonomy for the security of autocracy... The United States... inherited both the tremendous structural strengths that allowed the Roman Republic to thrive for so long and some of the same structural weaknesses that led eventually to its demise.”
In short: Rome didn’t fall because a strongman seized power. It fell because the people gave it to him.
The founders of the United States understood this. They modeled our system — deliberately — on what they believed the Roman Republic got right. Checks and balances. A representative body. Term limits. Rule of law.
But what if we also inherited the parts that broke it?
In the final years of the Republic, elections turned into bloodsport. Senators stopped cooperating. Compromise became a dirty word. Demagogues discovered they could rile up crowds with promises they had no intention of keeping. Elites retreated into wealth and cynicism. The middle hollowed out. And the Republic, worn down and bitter, turned to Julius and Augustus — not with fear, but with relief.
Watts reminds us that republics rarely die from conquest. They rot from within when their people stop believing in them.
“No republic is eternal. It lives only as long as its citizens want it.”
So the question now — the one that cuts deepest — is this:
Do we still want it?