Great article at the link. I read Gibbon long ago and remember little.
The wonder isn’t that Imperial Rome fell, but rather that it lasted so long.
The same goes for the US. James Madison predicted a new Constitution around 1930, presumably to accommodate one that tended toward the monarchical form. We got FDR in 1932, the closest prez to a monarch outside, perhaps, of Bammy.
As with Rome, the wonder is our longevity despite decades of open corruption.