End of an Empire: Bang or Whimper?

In T.S. Eliot's poem "The Hollow Men" he writes:

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper

So. Is that the way the Grand Empire of the United States of America ends?

Today Victor Davis Hanson reviews the end of the Roman Empire and its division into two parts, eastern and western. The eastern, Byzantine, empire lasted for a thousand years till the Ottoman Turks conquered Byzantium in 1453. The western half devolved into feudal Europe -- featuring for many centuries the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation -- and then into the Europe of nations and now the Europe of whom Margaret Thatcher opined, "they're a weak lot, some of them... weak, feeble."

Hanson wonders about an America divided into a Byzantine heartland and Roman coasts.

The Zman looks at the end of the Soviet Empire. He thinks we are seeing something like the rise of the oligarchs at the end of the Soviet Union, and thinks that the rise of our current financial and tech oligarchs is telling us something. OF course, he writes, the oligarchs didn't inherit the Soviet Union.

In Russia, the oligarchs were brought to heel by the one universal source of power. Vladimir Putin, with the support of the intelligence community and the military was able to reassert civil control of Russia.

The career of Vladimir Putin is instructive. La Wik:

Putin worked as a KGB foreign intelligence officer for 16 years, rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel, before resigning in 1991 to begin a political career in Saint Petersburg. He later moved to Moscow in 1996 to join the administration of president Boris Yeltsin. He briefly served as director of the Federal Security Service (FSB) and secretary of the Security Council, before being appointed as prime minister in August 1999. 

Makes you wonder if there is someone in the US "intelligence community" with the talents and the ambition of a Putin. And when Putin resigned from the KGB was he acting on his own or with the approval and support of a "deep state" within the KGB? Or what.

Or, can we defang the "deep state?" Theodore Roosevelt Malloch proposes limiting careers of bureaucrats and congressmen and gradually defunding the intelligence agencies. But some of his commenters would prefer a midnight strike.

I don't know. But I would say that the modern middle-class, market-oriented society is different from the Roman Empire and the Soviet Empire, because the middle-class market-oriented society could operate perfectly satisfactorily without its "deep state" overlords.

So I would say that the important question is whether the ordinary middle class could tell the current ruling class to go fly a kite, and make it stick.

Or, more specifically, could the current vaccine mandate and CRT resistance cause the collapse of the current ruling class? Could the resistance tell the FBI to go pound sand, and make it stick?

We don't know.