I was in Washington D.C. during The Election, living halfway between the Capitol and White House. Concerned friends suggested I move to some boutique hotel in Virginia for election week, in case of ‘trouble’ in Washington. Or at least, they said, I should stock up the freezer, as I might not be able to get safely to the shops for several days if the results were bitterly contested. I took the freezer option (plus an enhanced cellar) and planned a week of working from home, to follow the news from each swing state, fortified by my supplies. It was all for nothing. By the time I woke up on the morning after the election, everything was settled: Mr Trump had incontestably won. So I gave up the working-from-home option and walked to my office on the Mall. The city was just as normal, except eerily quiet (everyone else had stayed up very late, and those in the federal government were perhaps silently anxious for their jobs). Weeks later I’m still eating my way through the contents of the freezer.
Ancient Rome has been in the air ever since, partly thanks to Elon Musk, who has appeared on social media in Roman battle armour and has come out with a load of theories – eccentric, outdated or downright wrong (my description depends on how generous I’m feeling) – about the fall of the Roman Empire and, by implication, of America too. One of his favourites is the birth rate: ‘Rome fell because the Romans stopped making Romans.’ (Yes, Romans were anxious about the birth rate, but they had been anxious about that since the very origins of their city, long before the empire ‘fell’.)
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