I completely agree with you that the Catholics voting for pro-abort politicians is a sorry scandal, and points to the sick condition of the American Church. I have no way to verify your graphic, but if there is one Catholic advancing the culture of death in America that is one Catholic too many.
With the rest, I pretty much disagree.
There is nothing in my post to indicate that I am not a “big fan of early America”. May be there are some, I don’t know. I simply point out that great as early America was, it is no longer, while there were many great Catholic nations in the past that lasted a very long time and left and admirable legacy. I listed some of them.
The American Catholics were a reliable Democrat block before the Democrat party went off the deep end with their satanic cultural policy. We are less and less so, even though the Bush presidency gave Catholics nothing to be excited about. I happen to be an economic paleo-libertarian and so would not personally go anywhere near Democrat economic philosophy, but the Church in general has no position on the economic issues that divide (less and less, I might say) the two parties. So you will see some Catholic support big government nanny state and that has nothing to do with them being Catholic, and so is beside the point here.
Of course, there is no shortage of liberal Protestants of any description. We have Protestant churches of the kind where Rev Wright, Obama’s pal is preaching, and the kind that calls abortion a great blessing, and the kind that would bless gay “marriages”, and the kind that would bless marriage after divorce, and of course every Protestant church has nothing to say about contraception whatsoever. You may have a solid conservative contingent — God bless you for that — but you also have cultural liberalism not merely among the flock but preached from the pulpit.
Further, Protestantism is a liberal idea to begin with. The entire notion that one can open the Bible, find verses in there that he likes and start his own church preaching that — is foundational liberalism. It is ironic to see a Protestant, whose movement was born in protesting the authority of the Church at every corner, now tell me how sad it is that the American Catholic Church does not exercise enough authority to crack down on our liberal wing. Get your own jeremiah wrights, gene robinsons, joel olsteens out of your own eye first.
Evidently there is a big enough shortage that Protestants voting majority democrat is extremely rare, so yes, there definitely is a shortage (as far as democrats are concerned), that is why the immigration laws had to be changed to replace Americans with Mexicans and Latin Americans.
And America's greatness far exceeds those nations and empires that you mentioned, power, ruthlessness, and longevity are not the measures.