(FINANCIAL TIMES) Are We Rome? Cullen Murphy's book with that title was published in the United States in 2007, capturing the concern that America was an empire in decline. Today, the fashionable question in Washington is: "Are we Weimar?" Is the United States, like Germany in the 1920s, a democracy in terminal decline?
These twin fears - Rome and Weimar - are linked. Internal and external weaknesses feed off each other. Conventional accounts of the fall of Rome stress both the barbarians on the frontiers of the empire and the rot at its centre.
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