Zeitgeist: Happy Birthday, America. History Says You Should Be Dead

According to The Fate of Empires, a 1976 essay by British General Sir John Glubb, empires come with an expiration date. That date is 250 years. America hits that number this weekend, and half the internet has noticed.

For some, the intense celebration this weekend is an act of defiance, that we are different, we are a nation that defies the odds, no matter how historical.

Glubb published his essay during America’s bicentennial year, and it reads like a 50-year time bomb set for this exact weekend. While the White House projects the story of America onto the Washington Monument and America250 throws block parties in all 50 states, Glubb’s essay is going viral for claiming the party doubles as a funeral.

The 250-Year Clock

Glubb studied 11 empires across 3,000 years of history, from Assyria to Britain. Most of them lasted about the same amount of time. The Assyrian Empire lasted 247 years, the Ottoman Empire lasted 250 years, the Spanish Empire lasted 250 years, the British Empire lasted 250 years from 1700 to 1950, and Romanov Russia lasted 234 years.

Glubb noticed that 250 years equals roughly 10 human generations. He argued every empire passes through the same 6 ages: pioneers, conquest, commerce, affluence, intellect, and decadence.

Here is the part that stings. Glubb claimed empires rarely die from outside invasion. They die from internal character change. Prosperity rewires a people’s priorities, and the empire hollows out long before anyone shows up to knock it over.

Glubb is not alone. Historian Peter Turchin builds mathematical models of civilizational collapse, and his data shows cycles of roughly 200 to 300 years driven by elite overproduction: too many ambitious people competing for too few positions of power until the losers tear the system apart. Turchin predicted back in 2010 that the 2020s would be a peak decade for American instability.

Thomas: Solomon put it another way. The crown does not endure to all generations. And it isn’t just the 11 empires Glubb studied. A lot of the Chinese dynasties only lasted around 250 years too, roughly 10 generations, the natural expiration of a crown.

We’ve been mapping closely to those six ages here in the United States. Pioneers, then conquest, go west, young man, manifest destiny as we went from sea to shining sea. After we conquered the West we had the Gilded Age and affluence, then the intellectual boom. Now we’re in the decadence era.

How Rome Cheated the Clock

There is one giant exception to the 250-year rule, and it happens to be the civilization America’s founders copied. Rome lasted over 1,000 years in the West and over 2,000 if you count Constantinople.

Thomas: And we do count Constantinople!

Rome did not beat the cycle. Rome hit the wall on schedule, every time, and survived by reinventing itself.

The Roman Kingdom lasted 244 years, from 753 to 509 BC. When the monarchy rotted, the Romans overthrew King Tarquin and invented the Republic, with elected consuls, a senate, and term limits. The young Republic then faced 2 centuries of internal class warfare called the Conflict of the Orders. The plebs and partition conflict culminated in the Lex Hortensia in 287 BC, which made votes of the plebeian assembly binding on everyone, patricians included.

This reform reset the clock and bought the Republic a double lifespan. The Lex Hortensia landed 222 years after the Republic’s founding, right around Glubb’s deadline. Instead of collapsing on schedule, the Republic metabolized its revolution through reform and ran another 200 years.

The engine eventually jammed. Conquest wealth triggered exactly the decay Glubb describes, reform gave way to a century of civil wars from the Gracchi in 133 BC to Actium in 31 BC, and Augustus answered with a full reinvention. The Principate of 27 BC kept the Senate as a republican facade over one-man rule. The Principate ran 261 years before the Crisis of the 3rd Century hit in 235 AD. Diocletian answered in 284 AD with another reinvention, the openly absolutist Dominate. When the West fell in 476, the East reinvented once more and carried the Roman name until 1453.

Notice the pattern. Rome’s near-death experiences arrive remarkably close to Glubb’s 250-year beat. The difference is what Rome did at each deadline: reform when reform was possible, reinvention when it was not.

Rome didn’t overthrow its king and replace him with someone else. They replaced him with no one. They sent an embassy to the Oracle of Delphi, which handed them a written constitution, the 10 tablets, and that became the foundation of the Republic.

The great conflict of the Republic was between the plebs and the patricians. Think of it as boomers versus millennials, with a class in between called the equestrians that nobody ever talks about, the Gen X. The patricians were the wealthy senatorial elite with all the money and power. The plebs were free citizens, not slaves, and they did all the fighting and dying in the wars. They wanted a greater say in government, which ties right back into no taxation without representation.

The compromise was a new office, the Tribune of the Plebs, a pleb elected by the plebs with veto power over the Senate. Veto is just the Roman word for I forbid. The Senate would pass a law, the tribune could stand up and say I forbid, and the law died. That metabolized the conflict into ongoing tweaks instead of civilization-ending revolutions.

Then came the era people have actually heard of. Julius Caesar gallivanting off with Cleopatra while genociding the Gauls, which is to say the French. Killing the French is a time-honored tradition. But it wasn’t Caesar who reinvented Rome, because Caesar was killed and they got years more of civil war. It was Augustus, running on a platform of make Rome great again.

One of his reforms was forbidding senators from visiting Egypt. That makes no sense if you think of Egypt as a nice place to see the pyramids and the tomb of Alexander the Great. But Egypt was the breadbasket of Rome, and whoever controlled the food supply controlled the army and the people. By solidifying control over the food, Augustus solidified control over the government, and that created the Principate.

When the Principate gave way to Diocletian, his big invention was the divine right of kings. He said his power didn’t come from the people or the Senate, not SPQR, but from God. That was deeply anti-Roman. Even Julius Caesar never called himself king, because monarchy was anathema. The name Caesar itself came to mean king, which is why you get the Kaiser in Germany and the Tsar in Russia. It isn’t subtle. Those are just their ways of pronouncing Caesar.

Rome kept reinventing itself partly because the world around it kept changing. Marius reformed the Roman military so effectively that Rome didn’t lose a major war to a non-Roman enemy for about 300 years. They were so advanced that in one battle between Caesar and Pompey they had so much artillery on both sides that they dug trenches. World War I broke out in 50 BC.

We don’t even know everything they built, because the details of those weapons were kept secret. We found an ancient computer on a sunken ship that used clockwork gears to map the stars and the planets, and we only figured out what it was after x-raying it with modern technology. The idea that the ancients were primitive and we are advanced doesn’t hold up to any historical scrutiny. A lot of technology, and a lot of virtue, has been lost since then.

America Has the Same Engine

Here is the context the doomers miss. America copied Republican Rome’s metabolizing mechanism, and it has already fired repeatedly. We didn’t host gladiatorial games on the White House lawn the same day we signed a peace deal with Persia. We are copying Rome on purpose.

The founders built the pressure valve directly into the Constitution: the amendment process, which lets America rewrite its own operating system without a secession of the plebs. In 1787, just 11 years after independence, the founders scrapped the failing Articles of Confederation entirely. Reinvention, not continuation. The Civil War forced the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, which historians call the “2nd founding.” The Depression era absorbed genuine revolutionary pressure. With communism and fascism rising worldwide, the New Deal rewired the American state and the radical movements deflated. The Civil Rights Movement ran the plebeian playbook almost exactly: marches, boycotts, and strikes that ended in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 rather than in collapse.

By that reading, the question for America at 250 is not whether the clock is real; it is whether the reform engine still runs, or whether America has reached its Gracchi moment, when reform jams and reinvention becomes the only option left.

We will likely see a constitutional convention in our lifetime. At that convention, we will define how we will look for the next 250 years.

America founded itself on a combination of the Roman model and the biblical model. The most quoted book during the debates of the Constitutional Convention, and we have the logs, was Deuteronomy, the book that summarizes biblical law. But the most referenced model for the nation was Rome. When we vote in America we vote in Latin. Aye and nay are Roman words. We don’t have a parliament like the Anglo-Saxons, we have a Senate with senators, copy and paste Roman. We copy and pasted their architecture too.

We didn’t go straight to the Constitution either. We went to the Articles of Confederation first, and we had presidents under those Articles. George Washington wasn’t technically our first president. We just don’t count the ones before him because he was too busy being general to take the job.

Somebody asked why the right to secede was never spelled out when the Union formed, and the answer is that politics is the art of the possible. You get the deal you can get, and the deal almost didn’t happen. Franklin had to come in and save it. Without the big-state small-state compromise and the free-state slave-state compromise, we would have broken into three, four, or five different nations. What held us together was threat. The Canadians burned the White House down, we were fighting Barbary pirates, and we couldn’t afford to stand alone, so we pushed the question of secession aside and hammered it out later.

We are already and empire and a republic.

Inside the republic the president is limited. The Supreme Court can say no, governors can say no, and sanctuary cities are basically in open secession, refusing to enforce federal law, and there’s little the presidency can do about it. Outside the republic the president has supreme executive power to blow things up and kill people. Obama killed an American citizen with a drone and suffered no consequences. Trump decided on his own to put the Iranian Navy at the bottom of the ocean, without permission from Congress or anyone else.

Jonathan: I was in the Marine Corps during the Obama years, and we thought it was wild.

Thomas: That’s the American empire. Most of Europe is a protectorate under the suzerainty of the United States. We let them imagine they’re independent, and they are for domestic affairs, but their foreign policy runs through us, the same way Rome let Judea keep its own king and laws while controlling everything that mattered. NATO is the United States. The single biggest protection of being in the empire is that countries with M16s don’t shoot at countries with M16s. Every conflict in the last 50 years has had an AK-47 on at least one side, and we’ve enforced that rule shockingly well.

Jonathan: Europeans love to throw their social programs in my face, how much better and more developed they are than ours. Yeah, because you don’t pay for defense. Our defense spending pays for yours. The moment you had to pay for your own, all your politicians looked at each other and admitted they couldn’t afford the social programs anymore.

Thomas: All of this comes back to one mechanism. The 250-year cycle happens to line up with the fourth turning, an 80-year cycle, and whichever one you look at, it’s calling for a crisis. The best answer America has is a constitutional convention, the in-case-of-emergency-break-glass tool the founders built in so we could reinvent ourselves for the next 250 years.

Most Americans don’t realize how far along we already are. We’ve passed the enabling legislation for a convention in roughly half the states. There are two ways to amend the Constitution, and the traditional route runs through the House and Senate and then ratification by the states. No amendment has passed in my lifetime. If we don’t start amending again, we’ll get a more violent crisis instead.

America is facing some kind of reinvention, and what we reinvent into will be determined by authors.

Why This Matters for Authors

Millions of readers now believe they are living at the end of an era, and that belief shapes what they buy. Decline-and-renewal is becoming the ambient backdrop of American fiction.

Rome’s reinvention story is a goldmine for novelists. Fiction set at civilizational hinge points speaks directly to this moment, which is why Roman historical fiction and Roman-coded sci-fi never go out of style.

Stories that take collapse seriously but end in rebuilding have a built-in audience. Pure doom is a crowded market. Doom plus renewal is the gap.

The founding era is having a moment. Museums, publishers, and Hollywood are all mining 1776 for material, so a Revolutionary War romance or founding-era thriller is a smart bet for 2026.

Jonathan: We’ve already had Civil War the movie, made by leftists. You can tell because they thought California and Texas would be on the same side.

We already have a subgenre called alternate history. What if Caesar Rodney hadn’t made it in time? How would history have changed? People love exploring that, and you can do the same thing going forward with a fourth turning. What would happen if we did this, then draw it out. Call it alternate future.

Thomas: This sounds hyperbolic, but it isn’t. We need a narrative picture of what the future can look like. Every war has a novel that inspires it, and it might be your novel. That should terrify you, because your novel may inspire the wrong war.

War isn’t inevitable, and I want to be clear about that. The Romans found a path through political conflict by violent rhetoric. If the rhetoric can be violent enough, if we can fight it out in full-throated, mean, listening debate, we can avoid physical violence.

Jonathan: Which is why the Charlie Kirk assassination was a bad moment.

Thomas: It put rocks on the scale toward war. Charlie Kirk was the let’s-sit-down-and-talk guy, and the left shooting him and then dancing on his grave signaled that they want the war. The left will likely kick it off because they’re the ones already in secession.

A sanctuary city is a euphemism for a city that has seceded to a degree, refusing to follow federal law. A euphemism is a pretty word for a horrible thing.

The left gets a lot of grace and patience, until they don’t. It’s a switch that flips, where suddenly everything has changed and you can’t remember what it was like the day before, and they don’t realize what they’re asking for.

That’s a lesson I haven’t seen telegraphed in fiction. You can kick a dog once and maybe it won’t bite you, but if you kick it over and over, eventually it will. The lesson is stop kicking the dog.

Jonathan: Going back to the Thrawn Trilogy by Timothy Zahn, Thrawn is killed by one of the Noghri, who had worshiped Darth Vader. It was when the veil was pulled from their eyes and they saw how the Empire had used them that they killed him. The Rebellion never killed Thrawn. The abused subordinates did.

Thomas: When empires fall, it’s usually not because a neighbor conquered them. They conquer themselves through decadence and corruption. And when they are taken by a neighbor, it’s a Genghis Khan kind of conquering. On his deathbed he said, I am not a great man, I’m just surrounded by weak men. I didn’t conquer these nations because I was strong. I conquered them because they were weak.

There’s a principle of parenting I’ve found helpful. My job when my kids are on the playscape isn’t to keep them from getting hurt, it’s to keep them from getting injured. The most important purpose of a playscape is to help children learn their own strength and weakness in a safe environment. If they fall off the monkey bars they get hurt, but they don’t get injured, and getting hurt is the most valuable thing.

My oldest stepped off the edge of a playscape instead of taking the ladder, landed in the pea gravel, and cried and cried. He learned a lesson that later saved his life, because months later he walked up a 20-foot staircase to an unfinished deck with a 20-foot drop, and because he knew what falling felt like, he stepped over it safely instead of walking off the edge.

Jonathan: Pain and damage are not the same thing.

Thomas: You can do the same thing with your fiction, but for stakes far more serious than a broken leg. You can grapple with the fates of nations and the fates of individuals. Write honestly about the consequences of adultery, show the suffering of it, and it becomes getting hurt instead of injured for your reader, who walks away thinking, “there but for the grace of God go I.” You show how easy it is to fall into temptation and how to guard against it.

Good fiction moves readers toward the good, the true, and the beautiful, and it doesn’t do that by ignoring the ugliness.

Jonathan: You enhance the beautiful by showing the ugly and calling it ugly. You can’t make beauty by calling everything beautiful.

Thomas: You can use this same comparative structure in every scene, interaction, and decision your characters make. If your fiction reflects truth, those scenes and decisions will reveal real outcomes and consequences.

My episode on morality in storytelling is about how you can cultivate virtue in readers by portraying strong moral truths in your story.

Ironically, that often means writing deeply flawed characters.

Books without good morality end up preachy, and this is true for both the left and the right. If you can’t show the consequences of actions through the narrative, through characters making choices that make sense and receiving consequences that make sense in the story world, you have to supplement with a sermon, and the sermon is the sign that your moral system is broken. There are a lot of Christian books with broken moral systems. They have too much Hallmark and not enough true consequence.

Jonathan: They can’t show it, so they lay it out for you in a bathroom scene, crying in the kitchen, or Bible Man shows up.

Thomas: You can save the Republic by writing big-picture fantasy or sci-fi about what happens to republics, but you can also save it by helping people fight decadence on the individual level. Every person who embraces suffering and forsakes decadence makes the nation a little stronger. When you go on a diet and eat the food that’s good instead of the food that tastes good, when you embrace exercise and suffering for its own sake, you’re resisting decadence, and it leaves the body through sweat and tears. So inspire sweat and tears in your readers. Some pains and some lessons are best experienced through fiction.

I’ve made up a story world for my children about twin boys, Bip and Bop, who fight a lot, get into trouble, and suffer terrible consequences for their terribly naughty behavior. In the old Grimm fairy tales the children rarely survive. Disney saved a lot of Grimm children from Grimm fates, but because of that I can’t use the Disney version, I have to make my own. Bip and Bop don’t always die, but they often get into real trouble, and there’s never a sermon. They just make decisions and suffer from them.

George R.R. Martin can’t finish Game of Thrones, and I think his problem is worse than having no moral foundation. He has an anti-moral foundation. Without a moral foundation you can’t write a satisfying ending, and Hollywood in general doesn’t know how to end anything. Look at Lost, How I Met Your Mother, and Star Wars. The show was a beta test of his ideas, everyone hated the ending, and now he’s got nothing.

Jonathan: They could have gone the nihilistic route and still made it meaningful, but they chose to break everything apart, and everyone hated it. When you build your moral framework, it has to be real. It’s a fictional story, but it has to reflect reality.

Thomas: For Martin to fix his story and write a good ending, he needs to repent and become a different person, the kind of person with the moral core to write that kind of story. We’re not here to judge him, that’s easy. We’re here to look at the plank in our own eye and ask how our own moral failing is being reproduced in the book we’re writing, and in the minds and imaginations of our readers. That should terrify you. You should write with fear and trembling.

Jonathan: There’s a scene in Kung Fu Panda where the master finishes training the panda and says, “You are free to eat.” The panda says, “Am I?” And the master says, “Are you?” And they fight over the dumpling.

Technically he was free to eat it, but sometimes there’s a war you have to go through before you can exercise the freedom. Freedom doesn’t mean you’re free of consequence. It means you’re free to fight. In the Marine Corps we call it commander’s intent. I need that navy sunk. Go do things that sink navies.

Thomas: Becoming the kind of person who can write good books isn’t just a matter of craft, it’s a matter of character and virtue, and embracing suffering is part of that. Taking responsibility for the bad first draft, for the first book you shouldn’t have published, is part of it.

For some of you, cultivating character means cultivating courage. For others, humility. For others, hustle. Those are different virtues on different paths, but as you cultivate one it supports the others. Humility gives you the ability to learn, which lets you learn courage and hustle. None of the hustle is any good if you’re afraid of hurting people’s feelings, afraid of writing the truth.

So write true books, write beautiful books, and write as if the American Republic depends on it.