Tempting to think we are in the Commodus years. I doubt it. If we are Rome this is Sulla vs the Gracchis (Trump). A populist goes against leviathan and goes down in a blaze of glory, cementing a toxic oligarchy that leads to a populist coup a generation later. On the other hand, if you buy that Brittania was Rome and America is Byzantium, then the 20th century looks a lot like the 6th, a geographic lob of the dying culture to a more defensible location under one last great dynasty. The dynasty is steadily chipped away over dozens of generations as bureacrats, gangsters, allies, and enemies all extract pounds of flesh from the decadent corpes until eventually, they cannot even afford the obvious new weapons to defend themselves. I see more clear parallels in the latter.

Bond market:

Victor Davis Hanson, Second World Wars interview with Peter Robinson: PR: Why is there a plural in the title? VDH: ...One is that, from 1939, when Germany divided up Poland with the Soviet Union, until... April of '41 - there was a Polish war, there was a Norwegian war, there was a Danish war, a low country war, there was a French war the blitz, there was a Yugoslav war, there was a Greek war. And all of those together weren't called the second world war. They were seen as isolated border blitzkriegs... And then something weird happened. In 1941 Germany... invaded its de facto ally the Soviet Union... Japan bombed Pearl Harbor... suddenly these border wars where nobody really knew what they were became the Second World War.