by Patrick J. Buchanan – May 15, 1998

“Lo, all our pomp of yesterday is one with Nineveh and Tyre!” So wrote Rudyard Kipling in “Recessional,” his 1897 poem penned at the peak of the British empire for the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria.

Two decades later, in 1918, a fateful year for Germany, the great historical pessimist Oswald Spengler produced “The Decline of the West.” On the eve of Hitler’s accession to power in 1932, Spengler wrote, “Optimism is cowardice.”