By Marcus Sterling
Emperor Caracalla issued the Constitutio Antoniniana in the year 212 AD. To the modern mind, marinated in egalitarian sentiment, this decree reads like a triumph of social justice.
By the stroke of an imperial stylus, every free man within the borders of the Roman Empire received full citizenship. The ultimate inclusion initiative.
It was also a scam.
Caracalla was no philanthropist. He was a fratricide who had murdered his brother Geta in their mother’s arms and then slaughtered twenty thousand of Geta’s supporters in the streets of Rome. He drained the treasury to gorge his legions and finance his Persian fantasies. Rome levied lucrative taxes exclusively on its citizens. The emperor did not expand the franchise to elevate the masses. He expanded it to bleed them.
The revenue came. So did the rot.
For centuries, Roman citizenship had been a covenant forged in civic duty, blood, and military service. It demanded assimilation and commanded awe. The Apostle Paul wielded his citizenship like a blade, halting the centurion’s whips by asking, “Is it lawful for you to flog a man who is a Roman citizen and uncondemned?”
When Caracalla bestowed this status on every breathing subject of the empire, he annihilated the value of being a citizen. By making everyone a Roman, he ensured no one was. The title shed its prestige, its cultural gravity, and its power to bind. It devolved from covenant to clerical entry. The empire staggered on for generations, but its civic core had been hollowed out. What remained was territory without a people, an administrative zone waiting for the barbarians to finish what the emperor had started.
We are living through our own Edict of Caracalla. The campaigns for open borders and mass amnesty do not argue that the illegal entrant has earned the rights of the citizen. They argue that the distinction itself is immoral. Non-citizen voting proposals do not strengthen the franchise; they dissolve the meaning of it by detaching it from allegiance.
The logic is Caracalla’s logic, updated for a therapeutic age: expand the category until it contains everything… and therefore means nothing. And like Caracalla, the architects of this dissolution are not humanitarians. They are accountants of power. The progressive state desires a pliable electorate unmoored from constitutional memory. The corporate oligarch desires a labor pool vast enough to suppress the wages of the American worker. Both cloak themselves in the language of compassion.
They want the border erased, not because borders are unjust, but because a defined citizenry is harder to govern and harder to exploit than an undifferentiated mass of consumers and taxpayers.
When citizenship is reduced from a bond of constitutional loyalty and shared historical memory to an administrative status stamped at a processing center, the nation does not become more inclusive. It ceases to be a nation. It becomes an economic zone. The passport cheapens. The glue dissolves. Yet we are instructed to call this progress.
As the temporal order decays, we must keep our bearings. We are not the first generation to watch an
empire devour its own foundations.
When the Western Empire buckled under the weight of its accumulated rot and the Goths poured through gates that no longer meant anything, St. Augustine of Hippo delivered the Church’s verdict. History, he wrote, is the tale of two cities formed by two loves. The Earthly City is built on the love of self, the libido dominandi, the lust for domination. It is the city of the technocrat and the open-borders oligarch. Because it is built on the sand of human pride, it will inevitably dilute its own foundations and collapse into ruin.
The Heavenly City is built on the love of God, usque ad contemptum sui, to the contempt of self. It is eternal, and it is ruled by the King of Kings. Washington, like Rome, is not eternal.
We are placed in this moment by divine providence. We must stand against the tide, demand justice, defend our borders, and resist those who would dissolve the moral order for profit and votes.
