America's demise was written when it gave away land it had no claim to in an ill-conceived attempt to spread itself from ocean to ocean. This cut off the entire center of the country from any contact with its core culture, language, or higher education for generations.

America claims to be a grand experiment in democracy, but that claim only held up for a decade until the French revolution took up the challenge. If America is an experiment, it is one designed to see what happens if you isolate people for generations, forcing inbreeding and declining education standards on them while the rest of the world evolves.

What you get is a profound and tragic level of ignorance and mistrust of any institutions that could better the plight of the people. In a world where one can get on a plane in LA in the morning and be in DC shortly after lunch our political system is still designed around the distance one can travel by horse and buggy to vote and still get home by sundown. Iowa alone has 99 governments within its borders, each with taxing and legislative authority, and that doesn't count city governments.

America is an experiment in divisive and fractured government in which no one can trust anyone and the people are the last in line to gain from their efforts. The only real surprise in this experiment is how long it has lasted before the hayseeds revolted.