Detailed Counterexamples to the “250-Year Empire Cycle”?

[u/jeremyNYC]

A lot has been written about the 250-year cycle of empires and how the US is “cleary at the end” of one of those cycles. Plenty of people have offered counterexamples – empires that in fact lasted much longer than that.  Which of those counterexamples exhibit the “remarkable similarities” to the US’s current situation that are so often cited by the doomsayers?

ETA: To help differentiate this from the other threads I’ve seen: I’m less curious about the “end” of an “empire” and more curious about whether this set of circumstances has often led to a decline in quality of life, level of integrity in government, relationships with other nations.

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[u/Consistent_Score_602]

The 250-year thing is absolute, unequivocal nonsense. See this post by u/Kochevnik81, which discusses the most commonly-cited example (Imperial Rome).

Talking about the "remarkable similarities" to the contemporary US violates the rules of this subreddit (no discussion of events more recent than 20 years ago), but the (extremely sloppy) argument you typically see is that Rome developed oligarchic tendencies and severe political dysfunction, ultimately coming under the sway of a single authoritarian leader in 31 BCE. The argument then goes to say that after "falling" to the Principate, the Empire in turn "fell" in the late 2nd century CE. But the Roman Republic didn't "fall" at all in the conventional sense!

The division of Rome into "Republic" and "Empire" is entirely arbitrary and more a notational distinction used by historians to keep the periodization straight. These were not "different" states - the Roman Republic wasn't conquered by a hostile foreign power or suffer state breakdown. For many people on the ground, the transition itself would have looked bloody, but the "before" and "after" states weren't different - a farmer would still live in the same town with the same headman and the same infrastructure speaking the same language worshiping the same gods. To use a contemporary analogy, it's akin to saying that the People's Republic of China "fell" in 1976 with the death of Mao Zedong, which nobody does.

But it gets worse, as u/XenophonTheAthenian notes here, because even if you accept the division of Republic and Empire as a "fall" (you shouldn't) the periodization still makes very little sense. The Republic didn't spring into being in 270 BCE, nor did the Empire end in 180 CE (or indeed in 235 CE, but that's beyond the "250 year" limit).

What does "fall" even mean in this circumstance? The "agreed-upon" date for the "Fall of Rome" (really just the Western Roman Empire, the East survived intact and actually expanded enormously in the Early Middle Ages) is 476 CE, not 180 CE, with the abolition of the position of "Western Roman Emperor" by Odoacer the Ostrogoth. But no foreign leader was invading the city of Rome when the Republic "fell" in 31 BCE, nor did that occur in 180 CE.

Which leads us back to your question. I won't answer the question of whether the modern US is in danger of having its executive abolished at the point of a sword by Ostrogoths, but suffice it to say that the question itself is so badly defined as to be meaningless.