America has always been a copycat. Its model: the Roman Empire.

The classics aren’t read today like they once were, like they were in the time of Washington and Jefferson and Madison. In framing the Constitution, the founders made no secret of their deference to Rome; everything from the Senate to the separation of powers to much of the judicial system was passed down from the Roman tradition or resurrected from the history books.

As if by destiny, the founders’ dreams were soon realized — the old empire had been resurrected on a new continent. The nation they created mirrored Rome in its prolific growth, its economic strength and its military might.

And if we do not take action, we will mirror Rome in its fall.

The prevailing legend of the fall of Rome holds that the empire gradually crumbled under the pressure of external invasions by barbarian hordes. Over the last century, the American empire has met similar enemies, and none can say we have not taken action. The Nazis and imperial Japan, the communist threat and these recent terrorist actions have all been met with strong force.

But it isn’t the foreign invaders that will bring the fall of the American empire, just as it wasn’t the militant barbarians that overcame Rome. The western Roman civilization did not disappear in an epic military battle; instead, the Romans, slowly but surely, became the very barbarians they sought to defeat. They gradually abandoned their moral high ground and adopted barbarian practices, such as the massive importation of slaves and the wholesale slaughter of civilians in foreign wars.

And once again, according to destiny, America is following the lead.

Our barbarian practices are limited, to be sure. Our practices do not yet involve intentionally murdering thousands of civilians in foreign lands, and there is no sign of any growing hordes of American fundamentalist suicide bombers.

The adoption of barbarian tactics in America has been far more subtle and, in a sense, much more fundamental. We have not adopted a more barbaric morality among our citizens, but in our government — in particular, in its fervent demand to spy upon its own citizens.

This movement has ebbed and flowed throughout the last 60 years of barbarian assaults, from the internment camps of World War II to the red scare of the Cold War to the terrorist panic of today. In every case, American citizens — like German citizens under Hitler, Soviet citizens under Stalin or any citizenry under a totalitarian regime — were asked to spy upon each other. Americans, it seems, all agree with the principles of individual liberty and freedom from unreasonable government searches — until these principles are put to the test.

The latest of these governmental attempts to mimic the barbarians is currently under debate in the Senate. Our senators are considering authorizing Operation TIPS through the Department of Justice, which entails giving thousands of volunteers in industries, such as mass transit, trucking and potentially postal and utility services, the task of spying upon U.S. citizens to discover any “suspicious activity.”

The plan may seem like wise domestic policy in an era of terrorist threats until one considers the likely consequences. Hundreds of thousands of untrained civilians calling in hundreds of thousands of paranoid suspicions, resulting in hundreds of thousands of innocent Americans subject to hundreds of thousands of probing investigations into their personal lives is not an “American” policy. It is the epitome of the very practices America stood its ground against when fighting the Nazis, the Soviets and the Taliban.

Today’s foreign enemies are not a true threat to the American empire. Saddam Hussein will never march into Washington D.C., and Osama bin Laden will never usurp the Oval Office. The real threat, dressed in the cloak of good intentions, festers within our own government: that we will give up our high ground of democratic principles in war against some violent, but ultimately feeble, barbarians, only to find that our own empire has become barbaric under our feet.

Such was the fall of Rome. America has always been a copycat.

Matt Lynch ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in English and political science.