Consider this quote by Edward Gibbon, from The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter XV:
“The incapacity of a weak and distracted government may often assume the appearance and produce the effects of a treasonable correspondence with the public enemy.”
Which, I think, explains why we are so often moved to ask, concerning our own national leaders today, “Are they wrecking the country on purpose?”
As Gibbon summed up the causes that led directly to the fall of Rome, he noted:
*The destruction of the middle class, leaving only a small stratum of the super-rich and a vast population of the intractably poor, most of them on welfare.
*Public entertainment that became a substitute for work and family life.
*Wave after wave of invading barbarians–many of whom had been invited into Italy by the Roman authorities themselves. And why? As our own leaders might have put it, “to do work that Romans won’t do.”
Does any of this sound at all familiar?
If history is sometimes boring, it is also sometimes shocking.