Chapter Six
Are We Rome?
These wall-stones are wondrous—
calamities crumpled them, these city-sites crashed, the work of giants
corrupted. The roofs have rushed to earth, towers in ruins.
Ice at the joints has unroofed the barred-gates, sheared
the scarred storm-walls have disappeared—
the years have gnawed them from beneath. A grave-grip holds
the master-crafters, decrepit and departed, in the ground’s harsh
grasp, until one hundred generations of human-nations have
trod past.
Those are the opening lines of an Old English elegy called “The Ruin,” written more than a thousand years ago by an anonymous poet contemplating the remains of a once-great Roman city, most likely Bath.1 Although he was probably speaking metaphorically, his line about the ruins being the work of giants fired up modern popular imagination, leading some to believe that English commoners in the Middle Ages regarded Roman ruins as the literal work of giants.2
It’s difficult to piece together what the common folk actually knew or believed of Rome, but the clergy and nobility never forgot it. All across Europe, Rome loomed large in their consciousness ever since the Western Roman Empire’s fall late in the fifth century CE. For more than a thousand years after, virtually every empire great or small fashioned a narrative portraying itself as the inheritor of the Roman tradition. That’s why words like “kaiser” and “tsar” all derive from “Caesar.” As Voltaire famously quipped, the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.
I wonder what Voltaire would think of the United States of America, which he helped inspire but didn’t quite live to see. I suspect his judgment would be harsh, both on the appropriateness of the name and because he was a valiant defender of free speech. We’ve come a long way from “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” That belief is part of our classically liberal intellectual lineage. We remember the words, and that they once seemed praiseworthy, but modern America seems to have watered it down to “I disapprove of what you say,” not nearly as good a foundational principle for a nation.
The work of intellectual giants decays, too, when it’s not remembered. Maybe that’s what happens first when a great nation falls. Sometimes the United States of America strikes me as a set of ruins in the making.
I first started thinking about the parallels between the fall of Rome and the fall of America because of something San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich said. I’m a fan of Pop, despite some political disagreements. He’s been around so long he’s practically an American institution himself, an elder statesman of sorts. He’s known for making his players think. He quizzes them on history and current events, as if he’s trying to make them not just basketball players, but citizens.3 Pop made me think, too, when I saw this quote from him a few years ago: “I worry that maybe I’m being a little too pessimistic, but I’m beginning to have a harder time believing that we are not Rome. Rome didn’t fall in twenty days or thirty years. It took a couple hundred years. The question is: Are we in that process and we don’t even know it?”4
It’s a fair question, one that’s lingered with me. I’ve noticed others making the Rome comparison more often over the last few years. Maybe that’s one of the few things us Americans still agree on, one of the things Pop and I would agree on. Most of us share the sense that our place in history is at the end of a grand story, not the beginning or middle, the disappointing outcome to a great experiment.
That’s a kind of victimhood that Americans share: we’re victims of history, born too late, trapped in the middle of a decline ordained by forces we didn’t create. We find ourselves the inheritors of grievances that predate us, just playing out our assigned roles at the conclusion of a narrative written long ago.
The American experiment was always a test of whether a diverse group of people could govern themselves and be free, and many of us have decided that the results are in and the answer is no. As I pointed out in chapter 2, more and more Americans expect to see another civil war during their lifetimes. Perhaps some Americans don’t expect another civil war simply because they hope to end the American experiment through peaceful secession. A YouGov survey found that almost 40 percent of the country favors secession, splitting the Union into several regional nations.5 Sixty-six percent of Republicans in the South favored forming a confederation of some sort. In the Midwest, the largest group in favor of secession was independents at 43 percent. Forty-seven percent of Democrats on the West Coast favored striking out on their own. Governor Gavin Newsom has taken to calling California a nation-state, while the Constitution regards it more as a state, as I understand it.6
Newsom appears to have retired this rhetoric for the moment—it seems that California is a state when we have a Democrat in the presidency, and a nation-state when a Republican is in office. It’s Schrodinger’s state: you cannot know whether California is still a member of the Union until you peer inside the ballot box. Imagine what will happen once every state acts that way, or when too many people do. I have to admit my faith in the nation was shaken when I saw the Capitol riot and its aftermath. I started to wonder if this was going to happen after every election from now on, no matter who won. Rome fell to invading barbarians, but us Americans have become our own barbarians, sacking ourselves.
Have we had our long decline already, and is this the beginning of our fall? The middle, even, or somehow the end? Popovich thinks so. A few months after he raised the question, he gave another interview where he expressed his dismay at the election of Donald Trump and delivered his answer: “And so, my final conclusion is—my big fear is—we are Rome.”7
I’m not so sure. These questions, though thought-provoking, aren’t well formed. Inevitably, the answer is that we resemble Rome in some important ways but not others. The only place I ever properly studied Latin was during my tenure in a relatively less well-off public school in southwest Ohio. It’s the place where I was pushed down a flight of stairs as my punishment for being an overachiever, but I took a lot away from those years too. The kids in my Latin class used to incessantly make fun of the plump young woman who taught the class, and of me, the nerdy Indian kid who used to stay long after class ended during lunch break and recess to hear stories about Roman history. In class she’d call me by my Latin name, Tiro.
Most of what I’m going to share about Rome came from back then. I brushed up on some of the facts in preparation to write the book, but one of the good things about Roman history is that our view of it hasn’t changed nearly as much since 1997 as our popular understanding of American history. In some ways Popovich flatters us too much; Rome appears on track to have lasted a lot longer. Hundreds of years from now, historians may regard the United States of America as just another short-lived empire that during its brief peak fashioned itself the successor of Rome.
Are we Rome? We should be so lucky. At the same time, there’s a lot we can learn from it. Over the next couple of chapters I’ll take you through several key moments in Rome’s rise and fall and show you how America’s arc parallels Rome’s. I’ll also analyze a couple of other great empires that fell. The first fallen giant I want to assess is Carthage, the Mediterranean superpower that had to fall for Rome to rise. More and more Americans these days are wondering if we’re Rome, but sometimes I think we’re more like Carthage, the great power that had to make way for an even greater one.
The Thucydides Trap
One of Rome’s first real crises of faith came when it faced its great enemy Hannibal in the Second Punic War.
Rome was just spreading the wings of its empire. By 264 BCE it had come a long way since its founding almost five hundred years earlier, which legend has it came from a pair of boys raised by wolves, or perhaps refugees escaping the fall of Troy.8 We speak today of a Roman republic and the empire it became, but the moment one became the other is blurry and disputed. People often point to Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon, the first time a Roman general took his army into the city, as the moment when republic took its first steps toward empire. But Rome truly began to pursue imperial ambitions centuries earlier, when its ships and trade routes stretched out across the Mediterranean, past Sicily, and it brushed up against a more established power.
Carthage was the preeminent power in the Mediterranean at the time, a proud North African city-state with a history and influence that surpassed Rome’s. The two had cooperated for a time, finding each other useful trade partners. But there came a point when both civilizations had prospered and their world had grown small. Things came to a head when they fought over the island of Sicily, the gateway between the eastern and western halves of the Mediterranean. Carthage’s position on the opposite shore of that naval choke point had allowed it to flourish, and now Rome wanted its turn as the Mediterranean’s gatekeeper.
Its reach almost exceeded its grasp. The First Punic War was inconclusive, twenty-three years of bloody naval warfare. Carthage had begun the war as the far superior naval force, supported by its stronger civilian fleet, but Rome learned from it, used its powerful industrial base to outbuild it, and eventually defeated it. The war’s end saw Rome in control of Sicily, and Carthage smarting from its wounds but still dangerous.
It bode its time for twenty years and then struck back. Hannibal launched the Second Punic War when he took his army across the Alps and invaded the Roman heartland. The Romans had thought the mountains were impassable, especially in winter. Hannibal brought war elephants over.
He ran rampant for fourteen years, occupying vast swaths of Italy without defeat. Hannibal stunned the Romans early on with his total victory at the Battle of Cannae, still taught to cadets at military academies across the world today. In military tactics, “Cannae” has come to stand for a complete victory on the battlefield, the envelopment and total destruction of an enemy army using a numerically inferior force. Eisenhower wrote, “Every ground commander seeks the battle of annihilation; so far as conditions permit, he tries to duplicate in modern war the classic example of Cannae.”9
One of Hannibal’s greatest talents as a general was his ability to know the strengths and weaknesses of his eclectic army, a motley of troops drawn from across Carthage’s expansive empire, united mostly by loyalty to him and enmity of Rome. Hannibal’s victory at Cannae was in some ways the product of his understanding of the value of diversity, combined with his exploitation of Roman conformity.
He knew that as the Roman army outnumbered his eighty-six thousand to fifty thousand, it would attempt to concentrate its forces into a deep column and break his center so that it could quickly flood in reinforcements to separate the wings of his army. So Hannibal placed his most battle-tested troops there, a mix of lightly armored but experienced Hispanics and Gauls backed up by Balearic slingers. The Romans underestimated them as cannon fodder and advanced, not realizing that Hannibal had entrusted his best infantry with conducting a controlled retreat, drawing the Romans deeper into the Carthaginian formation. Rome still had the numbers, but as Carthage gradually formed a concave around its column, it gained something better: surface area.
Meanwhile, Hannibal sent his Numidian light cavalry to keep the Roman horse occupied while his brother Hasdrubal led his medium Hispanic and Gallic cavalry to defeat one flank of Roman cavalry, then wheel to help the Numidians defeat the other. As the light cavalry hunted down the routed Romans, the medium attacked the main force from the rear, Hannibal’s African reserve infantry closed in from the sides, and the Roman army was completely encircled, then utterly destroyed. About six thousand Carthaginians died; perhaps fifty thousand Romans were killed, with another twenty thousand captured. The remaining Romans had been at camp, away from the battle.10
For the first time in its history Rome felt true fear, even panic. Its leaders looked for answers in the Sibylline Books, ancient prophecies inherited from its last king; its emissaries consulted the oracle at Delphi. It buried four people alive to appease its angry gods.11
But in the end, though Hannibal was a great general, able to unite and employ a diverse array of forces, he could only forestall Rome’s rise, not prevent it. Rome had won the First Punic War by outbuilding the Carthaginians; it won the Second by outwaiting them. Fabius adopted the unpopular but effective strategy of avoiding open battle with Hannibal, always moving the Roman armies to wherever he was not, knowing that Hannibal could win anywhere, but couldn’t be everywhere. Hannibal lost his grip over Italy over the next dozen years without losing a battle, never reinforced by Carthage, and was eventually recalled to defend against a Roman invasion of Africa. He was finally defeated at the Battle of Zama at the hands of Scipio, afterward named Scipio Africanus, the son of the first Roman general Hannibal had defeated. Rome finished off Carthage fifty years later in the Third Punic War, razing it and enslaving its citizens, bringing its near-thousand-year history to an end.
So are we Rome? Sometimes I think we’re Carthage, the great power coming into conflict with the rising one, being surpassed as the world suddenly grows small. The conflict between Rome and Carthage can be seen as an example of what American political scientist Graham T. Allison calls the Thucydides trap, a theory that holds that an established empire is doomed to go to war with a rising one as their ambitions put their interests at odds.12 Thucydides himself was describing the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, but I think the later Punic Wars are the more instructive examples for the modern day, with China standing in for Rome and the United States assigned the unenviable role of Carthage.
Taiwan is the main island that might draw us into conflict, not Sicily. But this is where modern considerations change the parameters of the problem. Though Taiwan is just off China’s coast, the way globalization has connected the world means that from an economic perspective, Taiwan is just on the US doorstep. That tiny island is the hub of global semiconductor chip production. The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company produces the vast majority of the world’s most advanced chips, with the US far behind in capability and China even further. State-of-the-art chips are increasingly necessary for a range of civilian and military applications such as data centers, automobiles, drones, missiles, and anything else involving artificial intelligence—as I finish writing this book, Russia has invaded Ukraine, and one of the most effective tactics the civilized world has used against it is starving it of advanced chips, depriving it of the ability to replenish lost tanks and missiles. While Sicily was the gateway to the rest of the world between Rome and Carthage, Taiwan is for the US and China. The question of who controls it seems to be coming to a head.
But while Sicily could not be moved, Taiwan, in a sense, can—or at least global semiconductor manufacturing can be moved away from it. Such a project is imperative for national security, but more easily said than done. It takes years of development and billions in funding to build new semiconductor foundries, often called fabs, and train skilled workers to operate them. China has embarked on its own effort to create a domestic semiconductor fab industry as part of its Made in China 2025 plan, which aims to meet 70 percent of China’s domestic semiconductor demand within the next few years. But China’s effort is at least ten years behind TSMC’s capabilities, which may help explain its renewed interest in Taiwan.13
The US is faring little better. Our own leading semiconductor manufacturer, Intel, has fallen at least five years behind the state-of-the-art, with its ten-nanometer node just reaching production at scale after facing years of delays,14 even as TSMC brings the three-nanometer node to market—smaller processes allow chips to be faster and more energy efficient.15 The machinery of the US government is ponderously turning to solve this problem. TSMC and Samsung are spending $12 and $17 billion, respectively, building fabs in Arizona, and the CHIPS Act recently passed by the Senate would provide $52 billion to stimulate US semiconductor production. Publicly, Intel argues that money ought to go to domestic manufacturers like itself even as it quietly asks TSMC to build its advanced chips.16
The unfortunate truth is that this is all too little, too late. The production from those Arizona fabs will be a drop in the bucket in the face of the US’s ravenous demand for semiconductors. And while $52 billion is a lot of money, the fact of the matter is that it will take hundreds of billions to turn the US into a semiconductor manufacturing superpower. We don’t need $52 billion and a couple of factories. To remain competitive militarily and economically, we need a Manhattan Project for semiconductor fabrication. We need to dramatically increase funding for semiconductor fabrication into the hundreds of billions, not tens, and recruit Taiwan’s top engineers for starters. But the project will require more than time and money—it will require us to refocus our educational system to produce more engineers than activists. Believe me, China’s teaching its kids calculus.
We aren’t doomed to fight our own version of the Punic Wars with China to control the gateway to the global economy. The modern-day chokepoint is technological, not geographical. The problem simply seems to be one of geography, because we’ve outsourced excellence in a key technology to a small island just off China’s coast. That means we can avoid fighting a bloody naval war over Taiwan if we find a way to bring the best things about it here.
We need to avoid fighting that naval war, because if we fought it today, we’d probably lose, as virtually all of our own war games conclude.17 The problem runs deep. One of the main lessons we should learn from the conflict between Rome and Carthage is that wars are not necessarily won or lost with great generals or decisive battles; more often they’re won or lost by economies. Russia is currently learning that lesson the hard way. But America may face its own hard lesson soon. Just as Carthage began the First Punic War as the vastly superior naval power but lost because Rome outbuilt it for twenty years, the US has rested on its laurels as it fought the War on Terror and given China a twenty-year head start in outbuilding our navy.
That task has already been accomplished. The PLAN, the People’s Liberation Army Navy, is now the largest navy in the world, with 360 ships to the US’s 297, and most of its ships are new, while the US relies on ones that are decades old. Only 25 percent of the US Navy’s capital ships were built during the last ten years, compared to more than 80 percent of China’s.18 The US wasted time and money developing its toothless and vulnerable Littoral Combat Ship, the first of which was recently retired after just thirteen years of service.19 China has seventeen naval shipyards.20 The US Navy relies on four, all of them more than a century old.21 In 2020, it made six warships to China’s twenty.
This numerical gap widens even more when you consider that the US Navy has defense commitments around the world, so could only send a portion of its strength to fight any naval war with China. We do have powerful allies in the region, especially Japan, which is converting its so-called helicopter destroyers to light carriers capable of carrying American-made F-35s (Japan doesn’t call them aircraft carriers because its constitution prohibits offensive weapons).22 We just inked a deal with Australia to help it build eight nuclear attack submarines, a sign of the gravity of our naval disadvantage, because no nation shares such dangerous technology lightly.23 But China has a capable ally too: it’s been rapidly building its military ties with Russia, with the two recently sending a sizable joint fleet to menace Japan.24
The US still calls its navy the most powerful in the world, exemplifying the American faith that naming yourself something makes it so. As a particularly cutting analysis from naval historian Claude Berube assessed the balance of power:
Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin [testified to Congress], “certainly we have the most capable and dominant navy in the world, and it will continue to be so going forward.” While the secretary’s support of the Navy is laudable, this statement is contrary to quantifiable trends and the future based on the continuing shipbuilding gap.
It is natural for any organization to claim that it is the best business, sports team, or school. It is understandable that public affairs officers build Potemkin-like propaganda machines to support their established organizational narratives and promote their brands regardless of what it is. However, rose-colored statements that ignore addressing challenges actually weaken the military and its goals… The nation and its military need to operate on facts, not hyperbole. The same joint culture that produced optimistic projections regarding the Afghan National Army and its efficacy now threatens to undermine its justification to the administration and Congress for a sufficiently sized U.S. Navy.25
The thought that the US military’s assessments of its own strength might resemble its assessments of the Afghan National Army is alarming, but probably apt. While the US spent twenty years orienting its military around occupying Middle Eastern nations, China spent that time building ships and shipyards. Warships take several years to build, test, and commission; building a shipyard, of course, is an order of magnitude more difficult. As Marine Corps commandant general David Berger put it, “Replacing ships lost in combat will be problematic, inasmuch as our industrial base has shrunk, while peer adversaries have expanded their shipbuilding capacity. In an extended conflict, the United States will be on the losing end of a production race—reversing the advantage we had in World War II when we last fought a peer competitor.”26
To be fair, one could argue that the focus on the number of hulls a navy has is misleading and that what’s more important is the tonnage, which correlates with how many missile tubes the navy has. On both counts the US Navy more than doubles China’s.27 Much of that tonnage comes from our eleven nuclear supercarriers, capable of carrying eighty fighters each, and our nine amphibious assault ships, which can function as light carriers with a complement of about twenty F-35s.28 Each of those fighters adds to the missile count the US Navy could theoretically bring to bear in a conflict. On the face of it, our carrier fleet makes our navy unmatched. At least, that has been the conventional wisdom for decades.
Conventional tactical wisdom is likely to serve us about as well as it did the Romans at Cannae. These navy-to-navy comparisons that focus on tonnage and missile tubes miss a crucial factor: if we fight China anywhere within three thousand miles of its shores, it gets to use its vast, rapidly growing arsenal of DF-26 antiship ballistic missiles, which it calls carrier killers. It’s been practicing killing American carriers on full-scale moving targets in one of its remote deserts.29 This is part of China’s anti-access/area denial strategy, which seems to be working. When the US Air Force learned China is now capable of hitting our military bases in Guam, it stopped stationing bombers there.30
Arithmetic is against us. Carrier-killing missiles are much cheaper than carriers and have a much longer range. The Ukrainian use of missiles to sink the Russian flagship Moskva was our hint that the nature of naval warfare has changed. Our massive, expensive carrier fleet is a paper tiger that can’t even get close to Guam, let alone Taiwan. If we tried, there’s a good chance that China would get to live the dream of recreating Cannae in modern warfare, overwhelming our ships with long-range missiles and annihilating them without taking significant losses itself.
None of this is even to mention China and Russia’s several-year lead on cutting-edge hypersonic missiles, which are fast, agile, and hard to detect or shoot down. They each began deploying hypersonic missiles years ago, while the US aims to develop and deploy its own by 2023.31 This is merely aspirational; our tests usually fail.32 Meanwhile, in summer 2021 China flew a hypersonic glide vehicle around the world. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark A. Milley said “I don’t know if it’s quite a Sputnik moment, but I think it’s very close to that.”33 Later, we learned that China had launched a separate missile from the first one while it was moving at Mach 5, defying DARPA scientists’ understanding of physics.34
For its part, Russia’s actually the leader in hypersonic missile technology, achieving speeds up to Mach 9 on its Zirkon missile, which it’s placing on ships and submarines in 2022.35 We claim to be in an arms race with China and Russia, but this is just American pride speaking. In terms of actual results, our progress is closer to North Korea’s: like them, we’re at least several years away from deploying hypersonic missiles, and our tests only succeed once in a while.36 This is the kind of thing that happens when a nation stops prioritizing education in math and science. It’s the kind of thing that happens when an empire declines.
The bottom line? If we fought a naval war with China over Taiwan within the next few years, we would almost certainly lose, reprising Carthage’s loss from the First Punic War as Rome outbuilt it. China’s already outbuilt us. Instead we should take a page from Rome’s playbook when it faced a seemingly unbeatable military power in Hannibal: avoid open conflict and outwait our opponent, rebuilding our diminished industrial capabilities. We have to recognize our weakness so that we can become strong. The US economy is still the world’s juggernaut, and our greater freedom and diversity give us a capacity for innovation that China doesn’t always allow. If we bide our time and devote ourselves to reclaiming global leadership in semiconductor and ship manufacturing, we may yet become Rome instead of Carthage.
In the best of all worlds, though, we wouldn’t become either.
Ladders of Power
There’s a crucial question most people don’t ask when they wonder if we’re an empire in decline: so what if we are? Why should we care about being the most powerful country in the world, and why should we mourn losing that status?
Certainly we’d rather not be conquered like Carthage, but why not be content to diminish and become a lesser power like Britain? The sun did finally set on the British Empire, but it’s still a first-world country with a high quality of life. The world didn’t stop turning when America, India, and many others started controlling their own destinies. If anything, most people were better off. Maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing for the sun to set on American empire as well.
The question of why anyone should care about whether the United States of America declines gets to the heart of the nature of excellence, both in nations and individuals. Ultimately, I don’t think pursuing national excellence requires that we be the strongest, most powerful country in the world. It would be a mistake for any country to make being the biggest and best a core part of its identity. Ernest Hemingway once said, “There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.” That insight doesn’t stop being true when individuals form nations.
Victimhood and hegemony actually have a lot in common: they’re the products of hierarchical worldviews. Both ways of thinking structure the world according to networks of power. Critical race theorists believe in a ladder of oppression where white people are at the top, followed by Asians, then Latinos, with black people and Native Americans at the bottom. That’s what the term “BIPOC” is meant to remind people of—it separates out black and indigenous people for special recognition, lumps all other people of color like Asians and Latinos together, and further separates all those groups from white people. Meanwhile, Marxists say the ladder of oppression is constructed by degrees of wealth. Feminists see a sex-based pecking order. The concept of intersectionality introduced by UCLA professor Kimberlé Crenshaw allows one to blend all these ladders together, constructing a complex web of power where people fall or climb the rungs of power based on who they’re interacting with, as context renders different hierarchies salient.37
So-called realists about international relations actually see the world in a similar way, except they build their hierarchy out of pure power itself, skipping the middlemen of race, sex, and wealth. This school of thought developed from the nineteenth-century German approach of realpolitik, which itself had roots in ancient theorists like Thucydides and Sun Tzu. While critical race theorists and Marxists tend to conduct their analysis on the scale of nations, a realist just applies the same hierarchical thinking on an international scale. A realist, like a critical theorist, divides the world into weak and strong. From there, it’s just a short step from realist to imperialist: if that’s all there is, might as well be one of the strong.
What you have to understand is that each of these worldviews claims not to want to think hierarchically—they claim to have been driven to it. No one wants to see their national or global community so cynically, driven just by the raw exercise of power as dominant groups write the rules to keep their privileges. These are views that people reluctantly conclude are necessary to fully explain the phenomena they observe. A critical race theorist, for instance, starts by describing the real racism of the past and the way it ordered society, such as with Jim Crow laws, and then they simply keep applying the same method, using the lens of racism to describe the social structures of the present. Although CRT proponents, feminists, and Marxists all spend a lot of time describing the world in terms of dominant groups and subordinate ones, their stated goal is to dismantle the power structures they see.
But if all you can see is a ladder of power relations, that’s all you’ll be able to create. If you see a nation where a racial caste system orders everything, you’ll think that equality requires an even balance of power. And then because the old ladder of oppression had a long reign, you’ll think the only way to get an even balance of power is to create a new hierarchy that simply inverts the old one. A female student I talked to in law school, for instance, insisted that because we’d had so many male Supreme Court justices in the past, equality required that we have an all-female Supreme Court for the foreseeable future. It’s the same thinking that makes it seem obvious equity requires a black female vice president or justice. When you describe the world’s evils in hierarchical power structures, you’re prone to thinking the best you can do is flip the ladder of oppression on its head.
The same danger awaits when you see international relations as a zero-sum game for power and influence. When all you’ve trained yourself to see is strong and weak, oppressors and their victims, all you can think to do is claw your way to the top of the food chain. Unlike the British Empire, modern Americans don’t seek hegemony simply because we feel some kind of white man’s burden; we don’t see it as our sacred duty to civilize the rest of the world by bringing it under our dominion. In the modern era, we seek to preserve American power mainly because we fear that if we aren’t the hegemon, some other nation will be. It’s a relic of Cold War thinking that rears its head again as China rises and Russia stirs.
Both critical theorists and realists are vulnerable to the blinders they place on themselves. The realist becomes an imperialist because they fear that if their nation doesn’t dominate others, it must be dominated by them. For the same reason, the critical theorist can only imagine liberating themself from the oppression of others by subjugating them—like Kendi, they conclude that the only possible solution to discrimination is discrimination.
This is a trend Douglas Murray zeroes in on. He points out that the gay rights movement has led not to the claim that gay people like himself have the same rights as straight ones, but that they deserve a little bonus, too. For instance, he observes that gay people are often granted license to make jokes that’d be called sexual harassment when uttered by straight ones.38 Making irreverent sexual comments is just part of being gay. Likewise, he notes that feminism has arrived at the belief that women are not only just as good as men, but probably at least a little better; he cites feminists who argue the world would be better off if women were in charge of financial institutions.39
You can easily prove this yourself: you can’t get away with claiming that men are naturally better than women at anything, but say that women are inherently better than men in some ways and most circles will applaud your enlightenment. But if women are at least as good as men at everything and better at some, they’re just the true superior sex. Society’s mistake was not in thinking the sexes were unequal, then, but simply in elevating the wrong one. Say that men are the weaker sex, and many feminists will nod approvingly.
This is the danger of hierarchical worldviews made vivid: the natural response is not to eliminate the existing hierarchy, but invert it. If you try to counterbalance discrimination with discrimination, knowing that it’s hard to hit any target perfectly, you’re liable to think justice requires you to overshoot.
Kantian Fishermen
Chief Justice John Roberts once said that the way to stop discrimination based on race is to stop discriminating based on race.40 That’s true, but it’s only a corollary of a more general principle: the way to end a world defined by power relations is to stop defining all relations by power. Of course, there are real injustices out there, real power imbalances between groups, but you can’t make identifying them the foundation of your worldview. If you spend all your time thinking about how people are unequal, you won’t even know what it would mean to be equals. You’ll think that justice is nothing more than the absence of injustice.
That’s one reason I’m drawn to Immanuel Kant’s ethical theory: he gives a coherent account of how rationality itself commands us to treat each other as equals. I’ve mentioned Kant a couple of times in this book and my last one, but until now I haven’t had reason to describe his theory in any detail. The time for that has finally arrived, because Kant gives us the missing piece we need to escape seeing the world as a mere network of power. His categorical imperative provides a road map for what it would look like to have a world where everyone was fundamentally equal—no victims, no oppressors, no battles for individual supremacy or international hegemony, just human beings pursuing excellence together.
Kant advocated just one ethical rule that had to be applied to all people in all times and places; that’s why he called it the categorical imperative. Most people who have heard of him will have heard the version of the rule that goes “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of another, always at the same time as an end and never simply as a means.”41 In other words, never use a human being as a mere means to an end; don’t even use yourself as a mere means to an end.
That’s an idea I’ll keep coming back to, because pursuing victimhood as a path to power runs afoul of it. In some cases, like the Rachel Dolezals of the world, it’s blindingly obvious that someone is playing the victim card to profit from someone else’s suffering. She used black people’s problems as a means to gain employment and wealth, and they got nothing out of it. But in most cases, the central problem with victimhood complexes is actually that someone uses their own pain as a mere means to an end. Consider the Ben Simmons saga for an exemplar.
The Philadelphia 76ers took Simmons with the first pick in the 2016 NBA draft. He was supposed to be the next LeBron: he could do pretty much everything but shoot. The problem is, he never did learn that. Things reached a head when his fear of shooting rendered him a nonentity in a playoff series. After the Sixers lost, Simmons’s teammates and coach politely criticized his passivity. Simmons demanded a trade, refusing to play another game for the Sixers. Before being traded to the Brooklyn Nets, he racked up $20 million in fines sitting out the season.42 The moment Simmons started accruing those fines, he tried to wriggle out of them by claiming he couldn’t play because of mental health problems. His agent was exploiting a loophole in the collective bargaining agreement saying teams couldn’t fine a player if they were unable to play due to mental health issues.43 That excuse worked for a while until the Sixers got tired of it.
Here’s the thing: Simmons probably did have legitimate mental health issues, ones that went beyond basketball. He wasn’t just taking advantage of people with mental illnesses. Earlier that year, his sister had publicly accused their half-brother of sexually abusing her when they were children. A judge ordered her to pay him $550,000 after she failed to show up to defend her claims in court.44 The problem with Simmons’s actions wasn’t that he was faking mental health issues; it was that he was cold-bloodedly using his own mental struggle as a tool to get whatever he wanted. He let it be known that the mental health problems that barred him from playing another minute for the Sixers would cease to prevent him from playing basketball the moment he was traded to another team. He took his own pain and saw it as a convenient way to skip work and get paid.
That’s what Kant is talking about when he says it’s wrong to use even your own humanity as a mere means to an end. Simmons cheapened his own suffering when he tried to reduce it to a currency to be exchanged for goods and services. He wasn’t just exploiting other people’s mental problems; he was exploiting his own. A Kantian would say his greatest sin was that he failed to treat himself with the respect he deserved.
That’s the biggest problem with victimhood, from a Kantian perspective: someone who uses their hardships as a shortcut to money and power fails to respect themself. Not only do they overlook their own capabilities, but they commodify their pain. I think people are getting at this Kantian argument when they say that someone’s playing the race card, or the victim card, or any identity-based card. Even if they’ve never heard of the categorical imperative, they’re expressing this idea that features of one’s own humanity shouldn’t be used as mere means to one’s practical ends.
Here’s a prime example. The most important box to check in college applications these days is “victim.” A friend of mine interviews kids in New York City who want to go to Harvard. On a day where she interviewed nine candidates, she says that no fewer than seven of them opened the conversation describing some personal struggle they had encountered, including several stories of abuse by someone in a position of authority with respect to them—teacher, coach, or adult family member. She was particularly struck by the fact that she didn’t ask about this, but it was simply the first thing that the candidates chose to share about themselves. Some well-paid college application consultants promising to get the kids into the Ivy League had no doubt advised them all to open with a victimhood statement.
This practice makes young people use their own pain as a mere means to an end. You shouldn’t view your feelings about the racism you’ve experienced or the sexual assault you’ve survived as a good way to get into college, and you shouldn’t be asked to; those things occupy a different plane of value. That’s my main critique of victimhood. In many ways, someone who sees themselves as a victim and asks others to see them that way just isn’t respecting their own humanity enough.
While the categorical imperative’s command to respect your own humanity explains why you shouldn’t think of yourself as a victim, its instruction to respect the humanity of others explains why you shouldn’t seek superiority over them, either as an individual or a nation. That’s what people who wonder if we’re Rome are missing: the decline of an empire is nothing to mourn. The decline of a nation is a different matter.
Although Kant claimed to have only one ethical rule, he actually had several different ways of saying it. The one most people are familiar with, the one I’ve been using, is called the formula of humanity. Another well-known version is the formula of universal law. This is the one that most easily explains why pursuing excellence not only doesn’t require dominion over others; it actively opposes it. Kant summed up this take on the categorical imperative with “Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”45
That’s a bit of a mouthful, but Kant was basically justifying the Golden Rule. “Treat others as you’d want to be treated” is a great principle, and it sounds like common sense, but Kant’s genius was that he didn’t appeal to intuition or compassion with his more formalized version of the Golden Rule. He argued that sheer rationality compelled one to accept it. To Kant, being nice to people isn’t the foundation of ethics. It’s a conclusion that falls out of a coldly logical approach to getting what you want.
Imagine you’re a member of a community of fishermen. Each of the fishermen is rational and wants to get as many fish as possible, but they’ve collectively decided to place a limit on the number each can catch in order to prevent overfishing from decimating the stock. The question is, why not cheat? Why not find one way or another to snag a few extra?
Kant would respond with this: you’re considering following the plan “I’ll break the rule and catch some extra fish so I can end up with more than I’d otherwise have.” But, he would say, there’s something not just immoral, but fundamentally irrational about pursuing this course of action. You are making an assumption you ought to know is false.
What is that assumption? Well, we began with the stipulation that all the fishermen are rational, not just you. This is where universalization comes in, the ability to imagine what would happen if other people universally behaved the same way as you. If you think following the plan of overfishing is the rational move for you, you ought to conclude that your fellow fishermen will recognize its rationality as well. So when you imagine the consequences of overfishing, you can’t just imagine the world where you catch extra fish and everyone else sticks to the rule—to fully respect the rationality of the other fishermen, you have to imagine that they’ve reached the same conclusion as you and caught extra fish as well. That means that in a world where rational fishermen like yourself all overfished, the population of fish would be devastated and you’d actually end up with less fish. Your plan of overfishing wouldn’t achieve its own goal if everyone like you followed it.
In other words, when you follow a plan that won’t work if all rational people in your situation follow it, you’re making a logical error. Your plan rests on the assumption that other rational people in the same situation as you will somehow reason in a different way than you.
When Kant talks about respecting humanity, it actually strikes me as a bit of a joke, because it’s not nearly as lofty a principle as it sounds. What he means is that we need to respect everyone’s rationality, the defining feature of humanity, the thing that separates us from beasts. The joke a Kantian understands is that respecting people’s rationality isn’t meant to be a matter of being nice at all; it’s more like wearing an oven mitt to respect the heat of a pan. A rational agent must respect the rationality of others, the humanity of others, in order to make plans that effectively achieve his goals; he has to adequately respect the fact of his own rationality as well. When Kant talks about respecting humanity and rationality, just imagine poker players narrowing their eyes at each other across the table, all thinking, Yeah, I’ll respect you all right.
The problem with conceiving excellence in terms of superiority over others is that it’s by definition not universalizable, either for individuals or nations. If your goal is dominance over others, you necessarily must use them as mere means to your end. If everyone reasons that way, we get locked into the trap of hierarchical thinking, and are doomed to make others our victims to avoid becoming theirs.
Carthage and Rome found that out the hard way. Their imperial ambitions ensured that they got locked into an existential struggle not only for dominance, but for survival. Carthage could’ve thrived for hundreds of years longer, maybe thousands, if it hadn’t tried to gain revenge for the First Punic War and grind Rome into the dirt. As for Rome, things may have worked out for it in the end, but history could’ve easily gone the other way—what if Carthage had simply built more ships in the First Punic War? What if it had simply sent reinforcements to aid Hannibal’s invasion of Italy in the Second? Their mutual quest for hegemony guaranteed that one of these giants had to die. That’s a lesson China and America both need to keep in mind in the coming years. The question is not who gets to be Rome and who gets to be Carthage; it’s how both nations can avoid their fate.
Maybe instead of idolizing Rome, more nations should aspire to be Greece, whose culture loomed so large in Roman thought that it even copied the Greek gods. Carthage contended with Rome for dominance and was utterly destroyed, its people enslaved and its fields salted so nothing would grow. Greece lost its empire when it fell to the Romans in 146 BCE, but it never really faded. When we remember Greece, we hardly even remember that it was once an empire. Greece made its mark on history through its high culture, not armies or territorial control.
That’s America’s real strength, too. It’s our culture of freedom and individuality and all the artistic and scientific innovation that enables. What we ought to fear is not the decline of our empire, but the decline of our nation. Our culture of excellence is being replaced by one of victimhood, one where we fall into the old trap of dividing the world into hierarchies of power and arguing over who gets to be on top. I wish we could find a way to think of ourselves as Kantian fishermen. Our only enemy is the sea.