In a recent YouGov/Economist poll asking Americans to "evaluate the likelihood of dire political scenarios occurring in the next decade," the results are bleak.  Fifty percent believe that it is at least somewhat likely that the United States "will no longer be a global superpower."  Forty-seven percent believe "there will be a total economic collapse."  Forty percent believe that a civil war between Republicans and Democrats will commence.  When the measure of Americans who responded that they were "not sure or prefer not to say" is added to the above percentages, a whopping 69%, 66%, and 60% of the American people fall on the spectrum between "not sure" and "certain" that tragedy will soon strike.  So much for "hope and change," eh?

In another era, these numbers would have been big news.  That a majority or near-majority of Americans believe not only that the United States is on the verge of some sort of collapse, but also that the final precipitating event for such a collapse is only years away should be a wake-up call for the permanent bureaucracy in Washington, D.C.  While the sclerotic "ruling class" engages in increased brinkmanship abroad with nuclear powers Russia and China, ordinary Americans at home are stockpiling food, fuel, water, and weapons for expected stormy days. 

Normally, a national government facing such fracturing from its own ranks would immediately seek to forge unity and common national purpose among its own citizens.  Instead, Joe Biden, his political enablers, and the State-run corporate press retinues that filter the flow of publicly available information have sought to further divide the nation by targeting half the country as potential "domestic terrorists" deserving of persecution or imprisonment for their political beliefs.  Appealing to a people's natural patriotic zeal is ordinarily a surefire way of cementing common cause among strangers.  Alas, D.C.'s denizens abrasively disposed of anything so prosaic as patriotism long ago, first flirting with institutionalized disparagement of civilian "love of country" shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, and then outright abandoning patriotism as a civic virtue after the briefest of chivalric renaissances following the 9/11 Islamic attacks on American soil.  

The permanent political class thrives not on unity, but rather on stoking endless civilian division.  Likewise, common national purpose is useless for the corrupt cadre of agnostic Washington insiders and political saboteurs who seek to scuttle American sovereignty and rebuild upon its corpse the foundations of an international, one-world-government political State.  Rallying around Old Glory is today frowned upon by a cynical and elitist Washington cabal committed not to America or Americans, but rather to the loyalty-bending directives handed down from the plutocratic emissaries of globalism's apologists, Wall Street's robber barons, the United Nations' proto-emperors, the military-industrial complex's mercenary henchman, and the World Economic Forum's ruling Marxist Estate — not necessarily in that order.

Breaking Americans' patriotic camaraderie and cleaving the nation into many small parts occurred neither overnight nor by accident.  Record-high illegal immigration, society-killing crime rates, divisive school curricula that indoctrinate students with anti-Western worldviews while promoting race-based hate — these aren't random, incidental policies promulgated by flighty, misguided social engineers working in dimwitted haste.  These are programs designed to destroy a nation from within its borders by undermining everything that once kept it whole.  And to their ignominious credit, the devils sowing national division and reaping cultural self-hate have largely succeeded.  Large swaths of the American population do not trust each other and find no kind of historic kinship linking them together as one people precisely because the permanent political nobility in D.C. chopped away at Americans' shared identity until it splintered into a thousand pieces and then threw the remaining scraps into a multicultural wood chipper just to make sure the immolation of any unifying American ethos lay complete.

For three decades, the professional political class has dedicated its time and energy to denigrating America both at home and abroad, while doing business with and singing the praises of its erstwhile enemies under the banners of economic globalism and a "rules-based" international order.  The "land of opportunity," the "shining city on a hill," the "beacon of hope," the "light of the world," the "land of the free," the "home of the brave," "out of many, one" — all the great epithets, mottoes, and appellations rightly bestowed upon these United States for over two centuries have been undermined, sullied, and outright denied in order to purposefully bring America down.  The Declaration of Independence, respect for inviolable individual rights, limited self-government, due process, and equal protection under the law — all the significant triumphs accomplished and advanced by a free people in a New World have been bowdlerized from history's ledgers, betrayed in spirit, and rewritten as American sins.  America's best warriors — the real public servants who have selflessly sacrificed abroad only to be treated as faceless, expendable pawns by the political class here at home — continue to take their own lives at inexcusable levels that would have rightly horrified past generations.  Despondency, hopelessness, and despair have supplanted American confidence; pride; and ferocious, unbending determination.  The end result is that D.C.'s "politically correct" squatters have purged many of the very things that have historically distinguished America and her people as "exceptional," while inviting into the nation's borders the kind of byzantine bureaucracy, permanent political aristocracy, furtive currency manipulation, Marxist-socialism, and soul-crushing cultural self-hatred that have drowned so many other dying nations in their destructive wakes.

So the questions before us are these: now that D.C.'s parasitic political class has succeeded in coldly and meticulously dividing, undermining, and weakening America and her people, will the nationless Washington elites also succeed in remaking the United States into nothing more than another regional organ subservient to the international corporate oligarchs stretching their tentacles from the United Nations to the World Economic Forum and across oceans, continents, and once free nation states?  Or will all this self-inflicted American destruction end up producing unintended salubrious effects?  That is to say, has the political "ruling class" slowly strangling America today sufficiently drained the American people of the quintessentially American spirit that time and again retrieved our ancestors from the brink of disaster and certain death, or are we yet to see the kind of animating American resurgence that has beguiled so many of America's tormentors through the years?  Do Americans, kicked and abused though they have been, resign themselves to a fate they do not seek, or do they lift themselves from the ground to face their abusers cheek to cheek?  Will those who hold the garrote around our throats one day regret ever daring to get so close?

The answer to any of these questions depends on whether Americans remember that real power rests with them, not their politicians.  It depends on whether Americans remember that when united, very little slows them down.  It depends on whether Americans reclaim the country's founding principles, despite the protestations from those who have benefited from their abandonment.  It depends on whether Americans find the strength, determination, and courage to believe in themselves again.  Ultimately, it depends on whether Americans remember why they stand for liberty and as a source of inspiration for an often dark and enslaved world.  Difficulty may indeed lie ahead, but then, so too does opportunity.  What happens next is far from certain.  Yet this much is true: when Americans remember who they are, nothing can stop them.  And Heaven help those foolish enough to get in their way.

Image via Needpix.