Joy Reid Thinks More Diversity Would Have Saved Roman Empire

Last weekend, recently unemployed, professional race-baiter Joy Reid decided to play historian for a few minutes. In a very late bid to cash in on the “guys are obsessed with the Roman Empire” trend, she likened the Trump administration’s anti-DEI efforts to the collapse of the Roman Empire:

If you take that [diversity] away and try to distill us just down to white folks, we’ll be like Europe, an aging, slowly dying former empire. The Roman Empire didn’t survive because it didn’t have enough strength in its diversity. It suppressed its diversity, and it died. If the U.S. wants to be the Roman Empire, keep voting the way you’re voting, y’all.

Muddy thinking like this is a result of believing that The 1619 Project is actual history instead of ideological claptrap. If Reid had paid attention in any of her high school history classes, she would have learned that the Roman Empire was one of the most ethnically and culturally diverse societies to have ever existed. The problems only came when the Romans abandoned the healthy limits they originally set on that diversity, limits that she is hellbent on eliminating from American society.

E Pluribus Unum

According to the legends recounted by the Roman historian Livy, Rome was born by bringing diverse groups under a single banner. After killing his twin brother Remus, Romulus threw open the gates of his new city to “all the rag-tag-and-bobtail from the neighboring peoples: some free, some slaves, and all of them wanting nothing but a fresh start.”

When the neighboring communities refused to wed their daughters to such riff-raff, Romulus took a page from the Iliad and kidnapped the women instead, later telling them that “as married women they would share all the fortunes of Rome, all the privileges of the community, and they would be bound to their husbands by the dearest bond of all, their children.” During the war that followed the kidnapping, the slaughter only stopped when the women took action:

With loosened hair and rent garments they braved the flying spears and thrust their way in a body between the embattled armies. They parted the angry combatants; they besought their fathers on the one side, their husbands on the other, to spare themselves the curse of shedding kindred blood. … The effect of the appeal was immediate and profound. Silence fell and not a man moved. A moment later the rival captains stepped forward to conclude a peace. Indeed, they went further: the two states were united under a single government, with Rome as the seat of power.

This early unity, born out of blood and lust, became Rome’s greatest asset. As the Romans conquered their way through Italy, they turned enemies into friends by assimilating the rival cities’ people and cultures. Rather than simply demanding tribute as the Persians had, the Romans asked others to “buy in” to their success, rewarding loyal service with political rights within Roman government; the ultimate prize was Roman citizenship itself, which opened the corridors of power to those born outside of Rome. This forethought forged a bond between Rome and her Italian allies that even the mighty Hannibal could not break.

When Rome expanded outside of Italy during the Punic Wars, it built on these successes by embracing a healthy form of multiculturalism while providing tangible benefits to its subjects. For instance, the Romans didn’t care what gods you worshiped (indeed, they regularly adopted foreign gods into their own pantheon) so long as you honored those of Rome as well.

And even when cultural differences made such ecumenism impossible (as in first-century Judea), the practical Romans made specific exceptions to maintain the peace (though Jewish nationalism ultimately doomed these efforts).

In short, the Romans created an empire that was open to all ethnicities so long as those ethnicities embraced the cultural identity of “being Roman,” a forerunner of the “melting pot” approach adopted by the United States until very recently.

The Dangers of Unlimited Diversity

The wheels started coming off the Roman chariot during the third century AD. Faced with a military manpower crisis (sound familiar?), emperors started settling Germanic tribes on the Roman sides of the Rhine and Danube Rivers in return for their help with securing those borders in Europe.

Despite serving alongside Roman legionnaires, these tribes, known as foederati, were permitted to rule their own territories under their own laws. There was little, if any, of the extensive yet limited assimilation that marked the heyday of the empire. In its place were islands of Germanic culture that were often hostile to Roman society.

Two centuries later, this unchecked diversity bore bitter fruits. Pressured from the East by the Huns, the Germanic tribes fled over the rivers while their cousins held the doors open for them. Roman efforts to stem the tide proved futile; in 410, the Visigoths under their king Alaric sacked Rome itself, forcing the government to accept them as foederati.

Less than seventy years later, another Germanic warlord, Odoacer, sent the diadem and purple toga of the western emperor to Constantinople, a clear statement that Roman civilization no longer ruled Western Europe.

The Unlearned Lessons of History

This second, far more destructive form of diversity is the natural result of the Democrat Party’s obsession with identity politics. Instead of the American ethnic and cultural “melting pot” of the 19th and 20th centuries, leftists like Reid desire to establish a wide range of new foederati unencumbered by any obligation to unify.

This is why Democrats are resisting the Trump administration’s recent push to establish English (the primary vehicle of American culture) as our country’s official language. It’s why they howl about “cultural appropriation” when white Americans adopt ethnically diverse hairstyles, clothing, and cuisine. It’s why we have a “Black national anthem” that now must be performed in addition to the “Star-Spangled Banner” at the Super Bowl. And it’s why Democrat politicos are now calling for an alleged wife-beating member of MS-13 who entered our country illegally to be returned to Maryland.

Thucydides wrote his history of the Peloponnesian War in the hopes that it would “be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the understanding of the future.” Joy Reid, on the other hand, seeks to use false history to gaslight her audience into joining her on an ideological path that can only lead to national destruction. Instead of listening to poorly educated blowhards like her, we must honor the past and stand united in reforging a strong American identity for the future.

Robert Busek is a Catholic homeschooling father of six who has taught history and Western Civilization in both traditional and online classrooms for over twenty years. His essays have also been published in The American Conservative and The American Spectator. The views he expresses here are his own.