History teaches that empires are most aggressive, seemingly confident, and reckless just before they crumble. Spain’s desengaño (disillusionment) set in soon after Philip “the Prudent” launched his doomed Armada to conquer England. British imperialism peaked with the massed extravagance of the 1911 Delhi Durbar, which initiated two generations of global retreat. Russia’s 1979 invasion of Afghanistan fit the pattern, seeming to herald a fresh level of Warsaw Pact expansion but instead beginning a decade of decline before the Berlin Wall fell, and the Soviet Union itself collapsed in 1991.
There is a hint of something similar in the political wind now, as the Left, in its moment of apparent triumph, attempts to push America over the finish line into irreversible centralized control. As Daniel Henninger noted in the Wall Street Journal, Democrats are trying to “cram a generation’s worth of entitlements, taxes, and welfare spending into a single reconciliation bill.” But this is an act of desperation, for the Left knows that it’s the last chance to reach socialist Utopia.
