I'm a few years older and I must concur. Almost every time an article like it appears it will be by a liberal democrat.
That bunch is always seeing the darkest side of everything. They can't be happy about anything and want the whole world to be in misery with them.
The collapse of Rome (and the Ottoman Empire, and the British Empire) was primarily caused by the same factors that have brought down every great civilization (caveat: obviously this does not include those that were conquered by a more powerful invader):
1. Accumulation of wealth that led the descendants of the original people who created the empire to become lazy and slothful and weakened their work ethic;
2. Corresponding growth of unchecked bureaucracy and taxes that further weakened the incentive to work;
3. The “off-shoring” of more and more of the soldiery and workforce to foreign “barbarians” who were not invested culturally into the original nation and who therefore slowly assumed more power, weakening the cultural ties that held it together;
In Rome’s case, that allowed the barbarians to “kick in the door” of the rotting corpse that was once the Great Roman Empire ... currently a similar scenario is occuring in Western Europe, with the Mohammedan barbarians filling the “outsider” role, having been foolishly invited in by a weak, morally corrupt and soft Western Europe ...
... the USA is more resilient, but I fear that a thousand years hence the presidency of Trump will be seen as a temporary “rear guard” action that forestalled, for a time, the advancement of the inevitable cycle ...
... the capacity of the human race for repeatedly entertaining foolish doctrines (like socialism and Marxism) even after they have demonstrably been miserable failures, and the inability of generations to learn from the history means that the cycle explained above is inevitable in every epoch ...