Is it America’s fate to decline and fall? Here’s what history says.

Johan Norberg is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and author of “Peak Human: What We Can Learn from the Rise and Fall of Golden Ages.”

According to a much-discussed TikTok trend of a couple of years ago, men think about the Roman Empire every day. One reason might be that the fall of Rome is a memento mori — a reminder that we, too, are mortal. No matter how safe, rich and powerful the United States seems, it might all come tumbling down, as things did that day in 476 A.D. when the last Western Roman emperor was deposed.