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The United States isn't Rome. It's the Soviet Union.
What I mean is that we're not a stately empire being slowly devoured by migration and invasion. We're a bloated one slowly rotting from within due to years of military fixation and domestic neglect.
We're in dire need of systemic reform that revitalizes both the apparatus of government and the bargain with the people who make up the country itself.
Just like late-era Soviet citizens, Americans know the government is broken; unable to satisfy the needs of the citizens, unable to solve the modern problems that confront us.
The most salient comparison in our own history is probably the smaller government of the pre-Civil War days, one that was fit for a country with an agrarian economy.
It took a bloody war and forty more years of boom and bust, riots, and political violence to reform that government and right-size it for the new industrial era of the 20th-century.
The industrial-age government did pretty well through about the 1970s and then started to flag as a new information revolution took off. We're now a half-century into the information age and we're still running a government on outdated administrative software, to so speak.
All of the crises of recent years - and there's been way too many to name since 2001 - are symptoms of a government that's unfit for the period of history it finds itself in. It's too slow, too unresponsive, too disconnected from the lives of the citizens.
We're in need of a modernization effort that reimagines liberal democracy for the 21st and 22nd-centuries, making it more open, more transparent, and more data-driven.
That doesn't mean abandoning our values. The ideals America was founded upon are universal and inalienable. But they've always been just that - ideals. We've never quite lived up to them. They're more like compass points that should guide every reform decision we make.
But we have it within our power to remake our government. That's the beauty of liberal democracy and our constitutional system of government. It's essentially open software that can be continually adapted to the conditions it faces.
Democracies have the advantage of being able to draw upon and integrate good ideas from anywhere in an open architecture. Our adversaries can't recreate that in closed, top-down systems.
Ok it’s late I might finish this tomorrow 
