Where to begin? I've spent the last half hour typing a response to your question only to repeatedly delete what I've written while I gather my thoughts. I am pseudo-historian compared to the men and women against which I measure myself.
I grew up and became a man in an era of American history much like Rome during the reigns of the Five Good Emperors who governed the Empire consecutively for a period of about 90 years in the first and second centuries of the Common Era. This was the heighth of Empire. It was quite literally the best of times for a the first iteration of Western Civilization. For some it was a Golden Age. Imo that span of time was like the American Era of world history from 1941 to 2001. Others would say the era lasted from 1945 to 1973.
I was an American patriot who loved a land so dearly that my feelings crossed into nationalism and even chauvinism. I say this to give you perspective on the transformation of my world view.
In 2004 I began to understand that I had been willfully blind in many ways for almost twenty years. But then, I was in good company.
I knew denial and anger and the other stages of grief for a beloved land. Then for my own well being I began to detach myself emotionally from the fate of that land. Rome devolved, split up, and became something else while still calling itself Roman.
America was a polity the creation of which was based on an idea. What becomes of that polity when the idea dies?
I think I now understand how the Russian nobility must have felt around the time of the Russo-Japanese War when the Russian defeat revealed a hollow empire. Similarly, I think I know how some members of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union must have felt in the mid-1980s when they realized that they had spent seventy years on the road to no where. Neither the Russian nobility nor the Soviet intelligentsia could save what they loved.
The land that I loved is gone. And I am aware that the past can never truly be restored.
I am still in love, but now I am in love with the idea on which the polity was originally based. Individual liberty. This idea was born in Classical Greece, survived for almost 450 years in the form of the Roman Republic, and appeared again in the Venetian Republic of the Renaissance.
That idea was refined and distilled during the European Enlightenment by men like Locke, Montesquieu, and Rosseau. The idea became incarnate again with the birth of America and its Constitution. It spread across a continent, expanded to other races and women, and spread through the world.
The idea is now being rolled back slowly with the end of the American Era of the Western Epoch of history. But the idea won't ever die. It will appear again in some unknown polity among an unknown people.
Am I too pessimistic? Perhaps, but detachment breeds objectivity. Some will say that nothing remains the same. This is true. There is a tide in the affairs of men and women to paraphrase the Bard. And I have seen this all before in a book by Edward Gibbon.
