It may be different, but it will be worse.

I'm watching The Leopard, directed by Visconti in the 60's and set in Sicily in the 19th century. It's atmospheric but way too slow and talky, and I don't find Burt Lancaster convincing as a Sicilian prince. But there's a scene about two hours into it (out of a total of three) that grabbed me. Some sort of government stooge comes to Sicily, which he finds shockingly backward and squalid, to talk Lancaster's prince into accepting the position of senator in the new government. The stooge gives Lancaster a pep talk about how things are going to change, and surely Sicilians want change. Lancaster says that they don't want change, because they think they're perfect already, and that something in the atmosphere intoxicates and oppresses them into stasis, and that the beauty is dependent on the squalor. At the end of their meeting, he walks the stooge to his coach through the decrepitude and the stooge says just wait and see, this new modern government is going to change all of this...

And Lancaster says it's never going to change, or rather it might change in a few hundred years "After that it may be different, but it will be worse."

He could have been describing New Orleans, anytime before the diaspora, with perfect accuracy. It may be that believing it so made it so. Still, I'm skeptical that its future will be better than its past.