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Yglesias

1,500 Years of Right-Wing Punditry

One always hopes that things will change, but as Chris Wickham observes in his excellent book The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-100, right-wing punditry has been hitting some themes for well over a millennium:

Salvian of Marseilles wrote a long hell-fire sermon called On the Governance of God in the 440s which ascribed Roman failures against the (obviously inferior) “barbarians” to their own sins: notably, unjust and excessive tacation, public entertainment, and sexual license.

Some things never change.

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