Donald Trump was not my first choice for the Republican nomination. He often makes intemperate statements, and comes across as his own worst enemy during the campaign. He might not be the best person lead the United States down the right road to a secure and prosperous future, but he is at least on the right road. If we're on the wrong road, as represented by Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee, we have no chance whatsoever of reaching any destination except national ruin.

Robinson, Breasted, and Smith's most recent edition of Earlier Ages was written in 1965, more than 50 years before the current issues it describes with uncanny precision. These issues are, quite simply, as Michael Savage describes them: "Borders, language, and culture." Donald Trump has shown clearly that he wants to choose the road that leads us away from the Roman Empire's fatal mistakes while Hillary Clinton wants to repeat them.

One of the discussion questions for the chapter on "A Century of Revolution" is, "The racial change which took place in the population was the greatest single cause of the downfall of Rome" (page 366).  Page 355 makes it clear, however, that "racial" does not refer to skin color or ethnicity as it does today, but rather to attitudes, values, and culture. Rome benefited enormously from ethnic diversity while foreign, inferior, and non-Roman attitudes and values were the principal causes of its destruction.

Desirable Immigrants Helped Build Rome and the United States

Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party support unrestricted immigration while Donald Trump welcomes only immigrants who have job skills along with American values, or who are at least willing to adopt our values. The roles of desirable and undesirable immigrants in Rome are object lessons here.

Greece played a major role in civilizing Rome, just as Rome later civilized most of Western Europe along with Britain. Romans were the classical world's greatest engineers, and they built roads and aqueducts to last forever; Europeans still drive on Roman roads today. The Romans, however, owed most of their natural sciences and fine arts to desirable immigrants from Egypt, the Near East, and especially Greece. These immigrants' role in building Rome was similar to that of equally desirable immigrants in the growth of the United States.

The Greeks were, after all, the people whose stories described assault robots (Talos), industrial robots (Hephaestus' mechanical helpers), and flying machines (Daedalus and Icarus) roughly 2000 years ago. Modern experiments leave it open to question as to whether Archimedes used a heat ray from a parabolic array of mirrors to incinerate Roman warships, and modern solar furnaces use similar arrays of mirrors. Heron of Alexandria proved that steam could perform useful work while Dionysius of Alexandria built the contemporary equivalent of a machine gun. The Greeks were, in summary, the people who taught the Western World how to think.

The Greeks who wrote stories about Hercules could have even been said to have invented hydraulic mining because the hero diverted a river to wash excrement from the Augean Stables. The Romans put into practice the idea that water could remove other soft materials like dirt to reveal desirable ores and metals. This legacy from the Greeks is why the Western World and Westernized World (e.g. Japan) are still the sources of almost all patents and Nobel Prizes while the Third World and especially the Islamic world lag far behind.

Many of Rome's desirable immigrants were admittedly involuntary immigrants (more commonly known as slaves), but their influence on Roman society was nonetheless positive. The presence of a Greek tutor in a Roman household was a status symbol. Wealthy Romans might even purchase a Greek physician, who was then obviously treated as a valuable household retainer rather than as a domestic animal, the usual fate of unskilled slaves on farms or in mines.

The United States benefited similarly from desirable immigrants who included our own ancestors, unless we are Native Americans. The bottom line is, however, that all these immigrants either brought with them values and attitudes similar to ours, or they adopted ours in a process that used to be called “assimilation.”

When Diversity Becomes Perversity

Diverse and dysfunctional values and culture, rather than ethnic diversity, ruined Rome roughly 1900 years ago the way they are ruining Europe today, and are likely to ruin the United States.

"Moreover, slaves were constantly gaining their freedom, and they frequently retained slave ideas of conduct even after they were freedmen. This change in the nationality of the citizens, and the subsequent change in ideals, conduct, and government, were perhaps the chief causes of the downfall of Rome."

This is happening very openly in Germany, France, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and several other European nations that have not only permitted but welcomed an influx of fundamentalist "Muslims" substantial numbers of whom have nothing whatsoever in common with the advanced societies they now infest. They lack the Euro-American work ethic, Euro-American (originally Greek) inventiveness and creativeness, and indeed anything else of value to an infidel nation. They produce little and invent nothing except for particularly cruel ways to murder those who are unlike themselves.

An alarming share of the young males do believe they have the Allah-given right to kill, rob, rape, and/or enslave those who do not share their depraved ideology, which is why European governments are urging women to dress according to the standards of the 19^th rather than the 21^st century. After all, a woman who does not wear a sack over her head is "uncovered meat" whom any militant "Muslim" has the right to "take." Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and most of the Democratic Party wants to welcome this flood while Donald Trump wants to admit only those who have job skills along with values that are consistent with our society.

Slavery was eradicated from our country more than 150 years ago, but the Democratic Party is nonetheless infusing elements of African-American society with "slave ideas of conduct" in the 21^st century. The Democratic National Committee wants to keep Black people in a state of dependence on government programs because, while Black lives might not matter, Black votes do. While it was never proven that Lyndon B. Johnson said that he would have the N-words voting Democratic for the next 200 years, there is audio of Johnson using the N word along with an ethnic slur for Poles. Hillary Clinton's reliance on somebody like Al Sharpton to deliver the Black vote, or a substantial portion thereof, shows clearly how little she thinks of African-Americans.

This is not the only area where Obama, Clinton, and the Democratic National Committee seek to lead us down the same path that led the world's greatest civilization to ruin. The other issue is economic.

Excessive Government Regulation Ruined Rome

Earlier Ages (pages 359 to 360) describes how the Roman government ruined itself economically by spending far more than it could collect in taxes, the same way our government increases its deficit every year. A progressive income tax system, in which Rome looked to its "one percent" for revenue, resulted in a situation in which "there was no incentive to hard work when success in business meant ruinous over-taxation."

Rome's most productive citizens therefore "went John Galt" long before anybody ever heard of John Galt, with the result that Emperor Diocletian tried to force people to continue to practice their occupations. He added wage and price controls that reduced the ordinary Roman to a condition "just where the peasant on the Nile had been for thousands of years." Diocletian's modern incarnation, Hillary Clinton, wants similarly to raise taxes not only on the one percent but also on the middle class, and the middle class can meanwhile attest to how Obama's so-called "Affordable" Care Act has affected its finances and access to health insurance. Hillary also made it clear that she believes that the estates of wealthy people somehow belong to the government even though the government had no hand in creating them.

The United States is at a crossroads where one road leads to a prosperous and secure future while the other leads to the ash heap of history where the Roman Empire already resides. Donald Trump may or may not be the best person to lead us down the former path, but we know for certain that Hillary Clinton will take us down the latter. This leaves voters with only one viable alternative in November.

William A. Levinson is the author of several books on business management including content on organizational psychology, as well as manufacturing productivity and quality.