(Something I have been thinking the last couple of years. In addition to the arguments below, here is one of my own...think about professional sports in the USA and its resemblance to roman gladiator fighting. The mostly rich pay athletes to play for their team, while the common worker pays the rich to watch the athletes play...not quite the same, but switched into a modern context in the era we live in, the similarities are there).
Is America the new Rome?
By Noel Malcolm
The American edition of this book, which came out a few months ago, bore the title Are We Rome? Apparently that was the sort of question for which ancient Romans would have used the word ‘nonne’, expecting the answer ‘yes’; for the British edition is baldly entitled The New Rome. Sidney and Beatrice Webb did something similar when they dropped the question mark from their Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? - but at least they waited a couple of years before they did so.

Cullen Murphy, an author of stylish think-pieces in Atlantic Monthly and Vanity Fair, has become obsessed with the resemblances between the present-day US and ancient Rome. The big similarity, of course, is in geopolitics: at its height, the Roman Empire was a military superpower which dominated much of what is tendentiously called ‘the known world’ (known by whom? - answer: by people in the Roman Empire). Rome’s imprint on that large part of the world was not just military. The material culture of Roman life - art and architecture, clothes and food, even including the Romans’ disgusting fermented fish sauce - had an overwhelming allure for almost everyone who became part of the empire, or was in regular contact with it. And for those brought into the empire, Roman law and Roman moral values were powerful influences, often superseding the value-systems they had lived by before. For fish sauce, read McDonald’s; for Roman values, liberal democracy (or neo-con dogma, according to taste).
LINK TO CON.