I took a stab at answering Mathew Parris' absurd assertion the other day that the United States is a fading power- fortunately, Victor Davis Hanson also put out the good word on it:

All civilizations erode, but few citizenries are as sensitive to the signs of decay as Americans, who constantly innovate, experiment, and self-critique in a fashion unknown anywhere else. When we develop a class system based on British aristocratic breeding, accent, and social paralysis, or sink into a multicultural cauldron like the endemic violence of an India or Africa, or cease believing in either God or children like an Amsterdam or Brussels, or require the state coercion of a China to maintain harmony, or become a racialist state such as Japan, then it is time to worry.

But we are not there yet by a long shot.

Old Europe, gleefully seconded by domestic gloom-and-doomers in the Democratic ranks, likes to contemplate the end of the United States but the plain fact of the matter is that each decade finds the United States more powerful than the decade before - and our power now is so overwhelming and our lead over everyone else so substantial that the best anyone else can hope for is that if they work really hard, they'll only remain far behind rather than hopelessly behind.

Our power, good people, is inexhaustible because it is always replenished; inspired by our sublime Declaration of Independence and supported by our august Constitution, we should look with clear, fearless eyes into the future. The rest of the world will continue to rise, but the United States will be ever in the van because we are the one nation which in truth actually embraces change. The future is bright before us - it will have its many trials and heartbreaks, and the croakers pronouncing our doom will continue to be with us, but I envy those who are born in 2005 because as I pass into the hereafter decades hence, they will be living in an even greater, more powerful and more beautiful America than I can imagine.