Before discussing those empires, we should name and describe this counter-liberal ideology. There is a pro-system party in modern Russia calling itself the National Bolsheviks; their followers are called nazbols for short. Unlike real Bolsheviks, they believe in a master race; unlike Nazis, they believe in class solidarity within that master race. The master race pays for cradle-to-grave socialism for the master race through the superprofits of imperialism, which also pays for the redistribution of the means of destruction within the entire master race.
The Romans were another such nazbol society. It began as a forerunner of liberal bourgeois democracy under the Republic, but its socialist reformers gravitated towards variously social democratic and then nazbol forms of government as the Republic absorbed conquests and slaves from Sicily, Carthage, Hispania, and Gaul. Julius Caesar set up a welfare state of bread and circuses after he got done slaughtering a million Gauls (Michael Parenti, The Assassination of Julius Caesar, pp. 1-4). Before him, Pompey acted similarly in Asia Minor; after him, the emperors did the same all over. The proletarii were around to sire more legionaries, and the gladiatorial displays got them used to the idea of killing as patriotic sport, so they could do it for Rome abroad.
Britain had elements of nazbollery in their government when they began expanding abroad, but their empire was more liberal than nazbol and died of liberal weakness, not nazbol fragmentation, with one exception: America. In America, the colonies (and more to the point, the liberals ostensibly running them) were simply not safe from Native raids, slave uprisings, and worker strikes without empowering the colonial militias more than they'd have liked. The opportunistic Bacon's Rebellion proved this; Britain only secured Virginia by the governor extending democratic rights broadly to whites, who were then expected to go full Rittenhouse in defense of liberal property. The American Revolution, in broad strokes, was a nazbol-led society breaking away from a liberal one.
As I alluded in the last paragraph, nazbol societies emerge in a sudden bout of conquest and last long, but they do fall apart. They fall apart from the outside, as their enemies catch up militarily. But they mostly fall apart from the inside, from bourgeois vanity and arrogance, for that still remains their ethical core. Combining socialism with fascism is an ideological arch-contradiction only ever done because someone wanted to win a war for personal vainglory alone. And the question of who gets to rule such a nazbol empire will usually break it apart in the long run, because not everyone can be great khan, imperator, or president.
Roman imperialism lasted in the West for roughly six hundred years, about as long as the time from the quriltai that elected Genghis Khan to the fall of the last vassal khanate in Crimea to the Russians around the time of the American Revolution. America's empire is still an open question, but it already fractured nazbolically once, during the American Civil War, before being patched back together with the proto-socialist reboot of Radical Republicanism.
But all three did experience a massive civil war about a century after their initial conquests: the American Civil War, the wars that began with the assassination of Julius Caesar and ended with the coronation of the first emperor, Augustus, and the Mongol civil war between the Toluids of China and Iran versus the Golden Horde and the Chaghatai Khanate. Bourgeois vanity was the ultimate cause of all three, with ideological proximate causes found in liberal reformers trying to turn back the tide of nazbollery. In the case of Rome, the empire was patched back together just to splinter again in the Third Century crisis, as anyone leading a legion called themselves emperor and the Roman Empire was functionally divided into three states before Diocletian took over. In the case of the Mongols, their civil war ended but the empire was never reunited, and these khanates fragmented smaller and smaller as anyone who could try their hand at khanship generally did.
One of the side effects of the collapse of nazbollery is the assumption of political power by the workers. Every nation the Mongols ruled, save Iran, was or still is a Marxist-Leninist state. Were it not for American imperialism, both Italy and Greece, core states of the Western and Eastern Roman empires, would have gone communist after World War II.
As for America… well, time will have to tell. But it remains that the only country that the CIA couldn't possibly overthrow after a successful socialist revolution, is America itself. Marx predicted that the final socialist revolution would begin in America and Britain, and he hasn't been wrong about much else, so take that for what it's worth.
One of the ironies of this dragging process is that the classes so dragged end up being the epitome of the ideological concept they were dragged to. Social democrats are more dedicated to the concept of democracy than either the liberals or socialists that dragged them; they get in the way of CIA coups and communist purges alike. Conservatives are better capitalists than either liberals or fascists, because by exalting non-capitalist institutions like religion and family, they restore the workers to create more wealth and more broad-based wealth than either unethical class that dragged them is capable of doing. And nazbols are better at imposing their will in the short run than either socialists or fascists, because they can rally people around both class and race, and so rally more people than either corner could alone.
It is after seeing this dragging process in action that we can fully discern the ethical core of each class, as we see how it reacts to both victory and adversity. And even more than the sides of the triangle compass, this ethical core tells us about who is what class in each time period. If someone is acting greedily, they must be middle class. If someone is acting arrogantly, they are either rich, or middle classily keeping up with the bourgeois Joneses. If someone is acting carefully and in solidarity with others, they are probably workers.
We can and must use this technique of class analysis to judge everything around us, especially the theory we read and the praxis we observe. Any "comrades" acting arrogantly are not really comrades, but middle class posers who will sell us out to the fash when they grow up and become lawyers. The tragedy of the modern socialist movement is that we give pride of place in our theory to people who act like this. We should not.
This technique of class analysis is its own praxis. This little triangle compass can be grasped by any worker to tell anyone who might mislead us that they're in error, and why. It is our safeguard against the middle class taking over our movement, as Khrushchev did, and running it into the ground. With class analysis in the hands of the workers, we have no need of unaccountable professional revolutionaries, no need to just "shut up and have faith." The workers can take theory in their own hands, and once this is so, they cannot be stopped for long.
So go out and use this mighty tool of class analysis, to wisen the workers and chasten the middle class and rich. Class analyze history, class analyze your job, class analyze everything. Once you start, you'll find it hard to stop. So get started; we have a world to win.
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