The better they are, the harder they fall

 A new historical study entitled “Moral Collapse and State Failure: A View From the Past” reaches some very similar conclusions to my own predictions for the USA:

Societies with ‘good’ governments like the Roman Empire and China’s Ming Dynasty fell harder than tyrannical dictatorships, a new study suggests.  

When ‘good’ governments – those that provided goods and services for their people and did not starkly concentrate wealth and power – fell apart, they broke down more intensely, US researchers say. 

Although good governments may have been able to sustain themselves longer than corrupt regimes, they tended to suffer a more catastrophic collapse when new leaders undermined social contracts with the people.

It was two British ministers, Andrew Reed and James Matheson, and not Alexis De Toqueville, who wrote: “America will be great if America is good. If not, her greatness will vanish away like a morning cloud.” America has already ceased to be either great or good, indeed, she has ceased to be America and is now a perverse Pharisatanic empire ruling over a polyglot collection of diverse peoples.

But as America’s government was once both very good and managed to disperse wealth and power to a historically unprecedented degree, this study suggests that the coming breakdown is going to be more intense than even the most pessimistic observer tends to anticipate.