Mike Duncan knows how empires fall. He’s covered histories most defining collapses, upheavals, and regime changes through the Revolutions and History of Rome podcasts — the latter being a 179 episode, 73 hour long behemoth exploring the trajectory of the Roman Republic and Empire from conception to collapse. He knows what it looks like when things go wrong.
In 2025, it’s clear to Duncan that the American empire, which has dominated global geopolitics for the last century, has passed its zenith. Under the Trump administration, the devolution of the American ideal has accelerated in some ways that could only exist in the unique context of the current moment, and others that mirror the predictable, centuries old ouroboros of political power and decline.
“Everybody has a shelf life,” Duncan tells Rolling Stone. “Everybody has a lifespan, and eventually you do get into some sort of decline phase. The United States is still enormously powerful, we’re not on the verge of disappearing from the great power equations of the Earth, but is this thing pushing itself towards some sort of terminal failure? Yeah, sure feels like it.”
So how does the slow unraveling of the American experiment compare to the great declines and revolutionary periods of global history? No one is better positioned to read the room than Duncan.
Let’s start with Rome. We can’t talk about all 179 episodes but let’s do a quick recap of the fall of the Republic and then the Empire.
The fall of the Republic feels more like what we’re dealing with right now. It really has to do with the Roman Republic, emerging, for the first time, as the dominant power in the Mediterranean. And that kicks off like the cycle of economic inequality starts to grow between the very richest Romans and the poorest Romans, and that leads to all kinds of social conflict.
There is a civil war on the peninsula of Italy, between Italians who just want citizenship in order to participate in the society they’re a part of, and the Roman old guard who are trying to resist it. As these conflicts are starting to get heated up, the politicians themselves lose track of any kind of propriety or bounds about what can and should be done in order to pursue your own political agenda.
If you lose a vote or you lose an election, how do you respond? There used to be a very stable consensus that you basically accepted defeat. In the Roman world, the political leaders and the military leaders are identical. So now you have political leaders who are in charge of entire armies, and they are now going to start throwing those armies at each other, and that’s really what leads to the breakdown of the Roman Republic.
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In the 21st century, in America, we have huge disparities of wealth and income inequality, and we have fights over citizenship and who gets to participate in our polity right now, and how that’s sort of tearing us apart. And we have politicians who were like, “Oh, did I lose an election? Let’s stage an armed insurrection inside the Capitol on January the sixth.”
And after the Republic collapses, the empire continues to exist for another 500 years.
When the Republic became the Empire, it’s not like Augustus said, “I am the Emperor now, and this is an empire.” There were still elections every year, there was still jockeying among the senatorial classes to get these offices and win these elections. The entire apparatus of the Republic was maintained in place as a facade. It was just that all power was ultimately absorbed into this person.
It would be like if Trump, any president, were to simultaneously be the President of the United States and Speaker of the House and the Majority Leader of the Senate and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, who — by the way — has their vote counts for more than everybody else’s vote on the Supreme Court.
From the outside, it still looked like the Republic was in place. So if we go this route, we’re going to have congresses, we’re going to have Supreme Courts, we’re going to have a President of the United States, there will be governors, there will be elections, it’s just what’s happening underneath that facade. The facade is never going to go away, it’s how tissue-thin the facade is.
Lets dig in a bit to the role of the “elites” here, the kind of power they have to shape a movement.
Because of the way that resources are distributed in our fundamentally unequal society, very few people hold the trump cards in terms of wealth and resources over the whole rest of the population. The legitimacy of the ruler and the legitimacy of the system of government — the system of sovereign government, whatever you happen to be in — those enormous financial stakeholders are the very first people who need to be mollified in order to keep the regime in place.
If they break away, those are the kind of people who can then replace what exists with something else, and it’s very difficult to do that just as a peasant revolt. Peasant revolts have been a thing right alongside revolutionary history the entire time. Those peasant revolts have a tendency to flame out and get ultimately defeated or pushed back. If the people who control the wealth, resources, and ultimately, military superiority of the country, are together [in opposition,] it’s not going to turn into anything more than that. But if you have some of those people [get on board] you now have an influx of material ability to overthrow the existing regime.
That’s essentially what happened in the American Revolution, most of the founding fathers were of the wealthiest echelons of the colonies.
Yup! But in, say, the French Revolution, things got going in part because of the popular unrest and the popular upheavals, but also because there was an inner circle of members of the French nobility who were totally pissed at Louis XVI. Who wanted to reform the system, and who were themselves ambitious enough that they wanted to push their way into power and use the popular fervor as a part of that. The same thing happens in the Russian Revolution, where even members of the Romanov family are turning on Tsar Nicholas II, right? That’s the point where you can actually throw somebody out of power. Like, I would love to know what was going on in the inner circles of, like, Bashar al-Assad when he was kicked out of Syria. Who was finally telling him it’s time to go?
If I’m trying to bring this back to the U.S., there was a moment right in the aftermath of Jan. 6 where it almost felt like the Republican elite were willing to break with Trump, and he managed to exert authority and pull everyone back in. How does party capture — the subservience of entire systems — factor into this?
It’s just a very prototypical cult of personality. Part political party, part extension of one person that we’ve seen all throughout history.
It will be very interesting to see what happens when Trump finally dies, and what will happen to this movement, how much of it is truly beholden to his unique celebrity status, which he has over any of the other members of this movement. If you remove that, what happens to the movement? Does somebody else manage to come in and replace him and be the new focal point of the cult of personality? I don’t know that any of them have the juice for that.
Moments like that are themselves inflection points. Complete sidebar — how did you feel about the A24 movie Civil War? I struggle to see that sort of outcome it but I’m curious if it brought up anything for you.
I did several feats of mental gymnastics in order to have that movie make sense to me. But I got there in the end. You were asking what would it take to actually have a revolution in this country in that way, and the problem is, I don’t see it happening. Just don’t see it happening at all.
All revolutions are ultimately civil wars, right? In the U.S. there’s one side in this fight that is insanely heavily armed as a matter of their inner core cultural identity, and then you have the opposition to that, which is not very much not. All of the force, all the deadly, lethal force, really does seem to be on the fascist right now, which really sucks.
Do you think the U.S. remains the preeminent global empire or are we declining? China seems to be walking into the international gaps being left by the Trump administration’s recalibration of international relations.
Yeah, the high water mark of America’s influence over the world has come and gone. All empires are transitory, right? If you rise, you’re inevitably going to stagnate and fall. So predicting that the United States would not be as powerful in the 21st Century as they were in the 20th Century was actually a pretty easy thing to say, because the odds were that it would be true.
There are lots of people who, if you told them, “Hey, guess what, the United States of America is going to be way less powerful. Is that a net good or a net bad for the world?” A lot of people would say that is a net good. I think that that comes a little bit from a place of casting the United States too much in the ultimate supreme villain role versus other potential systems, governments, whoever.
There’s lots of villains.
There’s plenty around. And a world run by the United States vs. a world run by China — in terms of humanitarian crimes and death tolls and exploitation and stuff — would probably be about the same, if not worse, from China.
And this goes back to George W. Bush, who did a lot to set on fire America’s soft power and America’s preeminence over the world, because we torched so many allies going into Iraq. Then we get this correction with Obama, and the world at that point is like, “Okay, you guys kind of went off the rails for like, 10 years, but we’re now back. We’re willing to do this.” Obama’s a very rules-based, international order kind of guy. It’s like, “We won’t put boots on the grounds. We’ll just kill people from the skies.”
We have these new things. They’re called drones.
It relieves us of our moral responsibility. But the Europeans and the world is, I think, ready for us to be okay — and then we vote in Trump. So now the rest of the world is looking at a country who, depending on how the next election goes, will not stay committed to anything that we’ve committed to in terms of treaty obligations, in terms of trade obligations, we’re just crazy. So there’s no rational reason to make long term deals with the United States anymore, or count on them in any way, shape or form.
The second point to all of this: We are still insanely rich, like insanely rich. We have so much wealth, power, and resources that even a stupid hulking thing that cannot be counted on is still a stupid hulking thing, and therefore around and in everything, no matter what.
Was the fall of Rome this dumb? This is very serious stuff, but sometimes it feels deeply stupid.
I don’t think it was this dumb. I’ve really given thought to this. First, dumb to who? Because most people back in Roman times were illiterate and totally disconnected from the news of the World. Ninety percent of the people were just peasants, illiterate peasants, living in their little villages and so they didn’t know what was going on.
By the end of the Empire, the seat of power had moved from Rome up to Milan — closer to the battles, and then they even moved from Milan to Ravenna, because Ravenna is surrounded by swamps and water, and so it was very difficult to get at physically. And this actually made the imperial court very cut off, physically cut off from everything else that was going on around it.
So inside of those circles, the weird culty myopia that would have existed around these child emperors that were in charge of things. Maybe if we were to go there and look around we’d be like, “This is pretty stupid. You guys are acting pretty stupid.”
Maybe it was that stupid, but nobody would have known. Our curse these days is that because of mass literacy, mass education, mass communications, we are subjected to every stupid thing that these people do, and we’re all highly aware of all the stupid things that they are doing to dismantle the perfectly, basically, perfectly functional society that we had going on.
The big point that I wanted to make, though, is that there’s a certain type of person in history, they’re called the court favorite. You’ve got a king or a queen who’s taken a shine to some stable boy, or an actor, or some woman that they’ve decided to sleep with, or some man. And because they’re the court favorite they’re suddenly made the Secretary of State, and all the other nobles in the kingdom are like, “Why is that guy a secretary? Why is he going to negotiate with the Hapsburgs?” And the guy’s an idiot and he’s stupid, and he usually winds up either thrown out, or assassinated, or beheaded because they’re way over their heads.
What our government currently presupposes is, “What if everyone running the government was a court favorite?” At the level of court favorite: ability, intelligence, awareness of what’s going on, like, actually good ideas, they have none of these things. Our entire government is run by the court favorites. Instead of just having it be like one person who’s messing things up, it’s literally everybody.
What would the terminal phase look like?
Well, in the Revolutions podcast, there’s a whole theory that built up: The Great Idiot Theory of Revolutions. Sort of the mirror image of the “great man” theory of history. But in these cases, what I see over and over again is governments that become incompetent, governments that make mistakes, governments that try to force things on people that are so unpopular that the people rise up against it.
A lack of people in the inner decision making circles with any kind of long term vision or savvy about how to handle politics, how to even manipulate people. You just sort of do things and it pisses people off. A well run government doesn’t have revolution. A well run government doesn’t trigger a revolt. A well run government kind of keeps persisting.
It’s when the apparatus can no longer adapt to its present circumstances that there’s a danger that the whole apparatus will get overthrown. And if we have an apparatus like we do right now that is maybe not meeting the moment, and in fact, is going the opposite direction, then that’s the kind of incompetence that will lead to total and complete social upheaval.
Is the U.S. past the point of no return?
I don’t know. I will tell you I am congenitally an optimist. I have a Pascal’s Wager thing going with hope and optimism, that it’s probably better to act as if hope can possibly exist than to just say there is none and we’re doomed. So my official answer is, we’re not doomed, and there are ways out of this, because there’s ways out of anything. We’re ingenious little creative monkeys, we can get out of scrapes. We’ve gotten out of scrapes before. Maybe we can get out of this scrape.
I would hate for the takeaway to be that things are hopeless and that we’re just doomed. That just because things look like they’re very bad, and they will end badly, that means that they’re going to end badly. That’s not actually the case and there are always ways to fight and turn things back.
From Rolling Stone US
