WE WOULDN’T BE HAVING THIS CONVERSATION IF THE ROMANS HAD NUCLEAR WEAPONS

I was recently listening to The Rest is History, a podcast co-hosted by popular historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook. The episode was about Germany before 1933, and Hitler’s and the top Nazis’ ideology. In the podcast, Sandbrook speaks at length about Hitler’s belief in the racial, intellectual, and especially military supremacy of the Romans. In Nazi ideology, the Romans are the true Aryan forbears of the Volk—the German people.

When I heard this, the little refrigerator lightbulb went on in my head: “Oh, those are the men who frequently think about the Roman Empire!”

This is not to say the fanboys of the ancient Romans are all closet Nazis, nor that they necessarily have fascist tendencies. No, I think SPQR appeals to some men because it is a “safe” power fantasy, largely sanitized by two intervening millennia, and 70-odd years of Brits pretending to be Romans in sword-and-sandal epics. Rome sat astride the known world for roughly 10 centuries (Thousand Year Reich—sound familiar?). Romans built the Colosseum, the Aqueducts, and created a calendar, Roman numerals, bound books, and crucified a few troublesome rabbis along the way. Never mind that if a modern consumer of historical fiction were transported back to ancient Rome—or Greece, or pretty much anywhere in the ancient world—they would much more likely be helots than senators. Plus ça change…

My guess is that somewhere along a continuum between wanting a more important job and becoming a mass murderer, some men soothe their perceived impotence with thoughts of empire. Roman Empire. The fantasy isn’t the problem, of course: it’s the feelings of disempowerment and unacknowledged grief at one end of the spectrum, and homicidal rage at the other. And I don’t think think it’s confined to men. Women, including two of the three women on the Supreme Court, watch their rights being stripped away by men (and other women) who are nostalgic for the 1950s—or the 1930s: kinder, kirche, küche. Meanwhile there are nasty wars being fought on every continent but North America and Antarctica; wealth inequity is large and rising in the U.S.; and we have the lowest life expectancy at birth, higher death rates for treatable conditions, higher maternal and infant mortality, and among the highest suicide rates in the world.

So much in our day-to-day lives works against cultivating a sense of individual agency, and as you go down the economic ladder, the feelings are more acute. In the U.S., white rage at changing demographics certainly drives some of this unrest, but its causes are broader and even harder to address than racism: peak capitalism, frayed family and social bonds, economic insecurity, and loss of belief in human dignity. If I were a New York Times columnist, I would offer some simplistic solution culled from the wisdom of cab drivers, because what other kind of solution can one present in 800 words?

The kids are most definitely not alright. Never mind the precarity of civil liberties and economic health: in the next election, roughly half of the voters in the U.S. seem prepared to give control of the nuclear arsenal to a man with a long and public history of poor impulse control and disastrously bad judgment. Comparisons between Trump and Hitler are overwrought, but in one way, the dictator and would-be dictator are eerily alike: