Rome wasn’t built in a day and it didn’t collapse in a day. The Roman Republic lasted a bit more than 500 years, one of the best examples of a representative democracy the world has seen. However, when the first emperor came in it spelled their doom. When the city was a Republic the people were supposedly sovereign, but then it became an Empire with a dictator who thought he was a god. Corruption, moral decay, and judicial rot subsequently infected the Empire and it became an unwieldy, lumbering, ripe-for-sacking has-been. Will that happen to the United States? Yes. In this episode, I explore how it might go down.