Donald Trump, a New Roman Emperor

   Set up borders! Build walls to keep barbarians out! The Romans did with their empire what Donald Trump wants to do with ours. Keep it where it is! Stop advancing! Keep everyone rich and at peace within and everyone else out! The Romans had 300,000 men in their army and their technology was not equalled until the 15th century but they had had enough. They set up the limes, the boundary-line that must not be crossed. They limited their expansion. They tried to be an empire and also stop its growth. It doesn’t work. Empires don’t go anywhere but down once they decide they no longer want to go anywhere.

   A wall right across the Mexican border! A new limes! Pull back our military forces from their hundreds of bases around the world! Make American Corporations who are multinational national! The history books have told us for generations we are a nation so it’s time to be one. USA! USA! We want to have walls, borders, limits. We have never been one people and we want to be one. We have always been open to all peoples but we don’t want to be open anymore. We want to become great by becoming closed. We are afraid, terribly afraid, of continually adapting and changing. We want to be one thing, not a million things. We want to be what our history and our political system have never allowed us to be, one anything. Look at the Hungarians! Look at the Austrians! They are one thing. They are keeping all other things out. Look at them building walls! Oh, to have some center somewhere! A capital city! A place full of border creators! Insiders fighting patriotically against all outsiders! Men of vision! Sages preaching a wisdom that foreigners eating their free food and raping their women prove correct. Another wisdom tells us not to set up walls because they invite humans to break them down.

   The American empire did not come from a central sovereign government that conquered peoples widely and ruled them sovereignly. The American central government was set up with limited sovereignty by 13 sovereign states and the revolutionary new empire grew in size by admitting new states. 50 American states are now legally united with the government in Washington DC and Article IV Section 3 of the American Constitution gives Congress the power to admit new states. Many states in the empire are more independent of Washington than American states but that is their choice. They are free either to unite economically and politically with a great empire of states or not. But the empire extends already to a worldwide alliance of states and human history will never allow some new Roman emperor like Donald Trump to put a wall around 50 of its states and to try to run the package like a nation.

Daniel McNeill