Condemned to Repeat It: When Our National Memory Fails

By Sara Robinson
September 25th, 2008 - 2:34pm ET

Those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

Santayana's warning is now such a persistent cliche only because it's so painfully true.

Where have we seen this kind of meltdown before? Oh, yeah, right—we've got those family snapshots of our grandparents waving at the camera from the edge of this very same vertiginous wealth-eating abyss in 1929, as their family fortunes whirled out of sight through the yawning hole at their feet. And, as Kevin Phillips has told us more than once, the path to that chasm was well-worn even then. The Spaniards forged the trail to this dark place in the 16th century. The Dutch sacrificed their last shot at being a world power here in the 17th. And the Brits dropped by and flung their empire into this same pit in the early 20th.