  ...Here's to hoping the American Republic is still a feasible option. I will start this post with two links, one a comment by a neoliberal on Iraq (quoted and commented on by Nebojsa Malic, part of the crew at antiwar.com) and another by the economist Jim Jubak on the 'cheap money' and consumer debt bubble. For Iraq and why American power is limited, click urlLink here For the commentary from Jubak's journal on MSN Money, click urlLink here . To fully grasp the importance of the commentary, put it in light of the partisan wrangling over economic issues and our willingness and security in foreign intervention if we are uncertain about our economic and financial well-being back home. Soldiers, particularly more so in our volunteer military, have families and sending hundreds of thousands abroad to occupy or die is going to leave one hell of a hole in our economy.
Both at first should seem foreboding with their predictions of an unstable economic future (when we have to play the austerity game the rest of the world knows all too well) and loss of power to intervene according the neoliberal and neoconservative models(no sending in troops every time we need to gas up our SUV's or because the Serbs and Albanians are torching each other again). I guess it could be somewhat sad that the twin mutually reinforcing myths of unbreachable fortress America and the "my country, right or wrong" have been throuroughly disproven, but this wouldn't be the first time in our history that this has come about. Furthermore, to keep maintaining these myths would require policies which would be anathema to the Constitution and would in the long run literally turn America into a fortress, and that would not be pleasant at all.
In short, telling ourselves myths and stories can be beneficial, but untenable in the long run and should be avoided on the practical policy level. The lesson we can learn here is that we cannot inevitably keep growing, intervening, and deciding the fate of Earth. The combination of all human agency and our structures interacting with the physical universe is only powerful enough to decide that, and as individuals, tribes, or nations, we are largely powerless and given our human history, that is probably a good thing for us and the Earth. We could go further and enact the policies necessary to keep on doing so, but it would not take long for the pounding of jackboots to crush our dreams and even the jackboot solutions eventually fail and always have.
One cannot ignore the problem of limits or try to smash them, as we can attest to the failures of Rome, Persia, Egypt, the Caliphates, Napoleonic France, Britain, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Empire. Theoretically, the policies designed under neoliberalism/conservatism could be indefinitely victorious, but theories are poor models for the real world of which we still have a very limited grasp. Basing our empire on the idea of expanding 'democracy' and neoclassical economics and unlimited growth (expanding markets) is problematic and the results of it are more often than not include murder, torture, massive collateral damage to material structures, degradation of resources critical to human survival, and the collapse of our liberties, security, and well-being at home. Empire, and other large centralized power structures, are simply not tenable solutions for human social organization.
The nation-state needs to be replaced with a new mode of public organization, until then, our economic problems will likely continue, regardless of what economic system we choose or is chosen for us. Now, this post should not be taken as an embrace of Marxist economics or of Malthusian collapse. However, our capacity for free markets and growth is only as large as our ability to access resources critical for 1) human survival (fresh water), 2) technological modality of our economy (petroleum), and 3) societal modality (easy transfer of information - internet - gold, semiconductors, metal ores, petroleum, etc).
Since we are yet to divine the boundaries of our universe, these resources could theoretically be infinite in supply, but our access to them is limited, and our own consumptive need (need being subjective to our physical and social existence) security even more limited then access (since some have more access than other for many reasons - this inequality being the conflict which has generated the environmental justice movement offshoot of the civil rights movement). Thus while our access will continue to grow and eventually draw from other places besides Earth and new technologies will allow replacement of some resources, where there are major points of change, some will gain access, others will not.
No economic/political system yet devised can give equity, and those that have tried have usually resulted in loss of access and greater inequality. A long run objective of any liberal/left movement that does not want to fail needs to include the drastic weakening of the executive branch. While such weakening would make it difficult to enforce any new policies, it would also weaken the ability of the state to use violence against opposition. Power would devolve to the local level and while such would allow many right wing organizations to gain power locally and enforce their nationalist or fundamentalist utopias, they would lack the power and means to enforce their ideas nationally or internationally. Thus, competition would be more between ideas instead of whom has military or financial superiority. Likewise, I am betting that our ideas, those of the liberal/left which are founded on the ideals of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness will win in the contest of ideas. 
