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Comment by personomas | Hacker News Reader

"Elizabeth Prophet regarded American society as existing in a state of decay, comparing it to the last days of the Roman Empire." [0]

She's definitely right about that one ^. A very slow decay, most visibly seen by its gradual fall of GDP and world influence. This is also paralleled by increasing social welfare over the years, which the church also rejected:

"Elizabeth preached against socialism in all forms, seeing it as part of the global elite conspiracy's plot to control all facets of society. She instead emphasised a philosophy of individualism. Palmer and Abravanel characterised the Church's viewpoint as a 'conservative Republican stance'."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Universal_and_Triumphan...

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What’s with this obsession with the Roman Empire ?

This the British talk this way in the 18th century ?

IIRC some strains of alt-rightism consider the Roman Empire to be peak manliness and therefore peak civilization and we should inject modern Western society with more of its values. Naturally everyone who believes this thinks they'll be one of the few privileged patricians.

Rightly or wrongly, lots of people feel that the USA is in decline. The Roman empire is a dramatic historical example of a world power declining, so people draw parallels. It's pretty straightforward, imo.

It was a fixation of literature, history, and political science, for… oh, centuries. Not unjustifiably, either. Any entity that becomes that immensely powerful and influential is gonna tend to cast a long shadow. It’s hard to take even a shallow look at a solid millennium of European history after the fall of the Western Empire without running into at least allusions to Rome all over the place. Longer than that, probably. Like you poke at 20th century European history a little (“why was Alsace-Lorraine a point of contention for Germany and France?”) and before you know long you’re talking about Rome.

“But why Rome, of all ancient empires? Why so Eurocentric?”

Well, the short answer is the Industrial Revolution started in Great Britain.

If you mean why right-leaning groups are interested in it: I’d guess it’s the narrative of barbarians threatening from beyond the borders, the cautionary tale of how that and internal corruption brought them down (“well that’s a bit reductive…”—look, I know that), the honor-culture stuff (real or imagined), et c. The more intellectual side of the right in the US (though I think they’ve been rather left behind at this point) may be interested because of connections to the founders, like Washington’s Cincinnatus-like rejection of power after two presidential terms (we named a fairly major city after the dude, even)

Now on the other hand Trump has gone insane and is completely misleading the Republican party, but this a completely different matter...

Trump only normalized beliefs already gaining ground within alt-right, neoconservative and fringe Evangelical ideology. His politics were just boilerplate Fox News/AM radio fare.

Blame the Republican party for preferring to embrace and try to weaponize their lunatic fringe, and blame the other side rather than clean their own house.

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