Our Future, 17th Century Spain

Velazquez, Queen Mariana

For once, I actually agree with Andrew Sullivan completely.

Real reform - tackling health care costs and access, finding a way to head off massive changes in the world's climate, ending torture as the lynchpin of the war on terror, getting out of Iraq, preventing an Israeli-led Third World War in the Middle East, and reforming entitlements and defense spending to prevent 21st century America from becoming 17th Century Spain: these are being resisted by those who have power and do not want to relinquish it - except to their own families and cronies.

Seventeenth Century Spain; arrogant, impoverished, isolated, fanatical, nepotistic, and backward, clung tenaciously to an empire it could no longer afford. Spain clung tenaciously as well to the notion that it still dominated the world, when in fact, the world had long ago passed it by and ceased to pay it any attention. Then one morning, Spain woke up to find itself as a semi-feudal agrarian state in the middle of an industrialized world. The way things are going, this could be our destiny in the later days of the American Empire.