Donald Trump wants to install an immoveable object on the southern border, but has come up against the irresistible force of Senate procedure. Yesterday, the Senate rejected two proposals, one from each party, designed to end Washington’s Mexican standoff. In cinematic custom, all parties are pointing weapons at each other’s heads. But so far the only victims are the 800,000 federal employees who missed a second monthly paycheck today, and the dignity of a nation that prides itself on the perfection of its constitutional arrangements.
The struggle between the executive and legislative branches has sent the bureaucracy into an induced coma. Great nations can function without a government. So can the Belgians, who in 2011 finally settled on a coalition after a blissful 589 days without a government. But a great modern nation can no more function without a bureaucracy than the Romans could function without a military.
Though the Democrats call Donald Trump a barbarian for insisting on a Great Wall, the closer resemblance is to one of the last emperors of the West. In the 4th and 5th centuries AD, the barbarians devastated the outlying provinces of the Western Roman Empire. This reduced the imperial tax base, and that meant that the legions went unpaid. The barbarians pressed on, and in 410 AD they sacked Rome.
Donald Trump may not be a reader of Edward Gibbon, or even J.K. Rowling. But Trump is a late Roman by taste, and his understanding of what is at stake on the southern border is late Roman too. The ostensible issues, border security and immigration policy, are the topical aspect of Trump’s posterity, a posterity which he, with characteristic modesty, identifies with that of the entire nation. But then, he is the president.
Not that immigrants from Latin America are barbarian. Most come for opportunity, and many in desperation. Anyway, American civilisation has never been short of barbarism at home. But the parallel exists, and is as old as the friction between the settled and the mobile. A rich empire, frequently ruled by law, abuts poor nations, often run by the corrupt and the criminal.
