The belief that we have in some way evolved beyond the past is quite absurd. the technologies may have gotten better true. but the mob behaves in the same way. the corrupt elites still do what they can to hold onto power. the hardware the Human OS runs on hasn't had any dramatic shifts in the last few hundred thousand years. the cultural patches can only change so much for good or ill. the likelihood of a strongman tyrant rises the longer that things continue as they have without intervention. and the longer it gets put off? the more lessons they will learn from those who came before about who needs to be removed from positions of power and influence.
Well, for one, we have health care that operates off germ theory, instead of shamanism and trial/error naturalist stuff.
We also know not to use lead as a sweetner, unlike the Romans; people forget how lead poisoning can affect the thinking and reasoning of people, and lead was everywhere in Roman society.
Shit, mass lead poisoning over generations in the leadership class explains a lot of why Rome got to the point it fell.
Human knowledge has advanced so far beyond what the Romans and ancient society's could even begin to understand.
The Founding Father's were lucky enough to found the US just before the Industrial Revolution came around, but after the first seeds of it had been planted with introduction of gunpowder, the sextant, and small pox vaccines.
The US was able to evolve into something new, because of how the nation came to be, when it came to be, and where it was founded. We had/have massively different existential conditions and pressures, we had the ability to chart our own course instead of having to play the same old game of the Europe, Med, or Asia; we never had to worry about thousands of years of blood feuds tied to old family's and clans.
Rome never had the advantage over it's frontier areas that the US had at it's founding and as it pushed west, nor has any empire ever come close to have as secure a geographic position as the US does.
The US doesn't have to fear land invasion anymore, Rome did, Spain did, pretty much every empire on the planet has had to worry about land invasions from one direction or another.
Illegal immigration may be bad and wrong, but it's not the same as worrying about Mongol's, Vikings, Huns, Persians, Ottomans, or Goths sweeping into your town to do a slave raid or just loot it.
And there were Romans saying the same shit you just said when people made comparisons to Perisa.
Neither Rome nor Persia existed in anything like the context the US was founded in and grew into.
It's fine to like history and examine it; it's a mistake to assume the politics of Rome, Persia, Spain, or any other old world empire really matter in the context of the US and our history.
I know it's a tempting rhetorical and argumentative flourish that will get likes from history buffs, but it's useless for actually understanding the US as is and what it will take to fix it.
'Cycles of history' thinking is lazy and backwards looking, instead of focused on the realities of today and the likely paths of our society into the future, as told by the stories of those who actually have lived since the Industrial Revolution began.
This is why trying to map Trump/Biden onto some historical figure and plot out/predict the course of American politics is worse than useless, and actually causes people to misdirect their efforts into fruitless avenues of action.
