1) Starting in the sixties there was an explosion of children born out-of-wedlock and kids who don't grow up in two parent families fare more poorly percentage wise on just about any and every scale imaginable including substance abuse, teenage pregnancies, suicide rates, criminality and homelessness.
2) Many people are becoming so childlike in their dependence on the government that they can't save for their own retirement, escape from an oncoming hurricane, or even purchase their own birth control without the government handling it for them.
3) Our legal system encourages frivolous lawsuits, is punitively expensive and because of the political inclinations of the judges, can often be almost random.
4) Leeching off more productive people has become much more acceptable. To many people, taking welfare, food stamps, free lunches and anything else they can get the government to force someone else to pay for isn't shameful; it's deserved, presumably because they're doing everyone else in the country such a wonderful favor just by existing.
5) The mainstream media has become so partisan for the Democratic Party that it's not significantly different from a state-run media. Every news story and scandal is reported differently based solely on which party is involved. "Scandals" that would destroy the careers of Republicans are largely ignored and treated as irrelevant when Democrats are involved.
6) Americans have lost confidence in our institutions. Most Americans don't trust our politicians, our criminal justice system, big business, our schools, our media or our churches.
7) As choices have proliferated because of the Internet, TV, and our affluent culture, Americans have become more alien to each other and share less and less cultural experiences. Today, two Americans may live in the same small community without ever talking, watching the same TV shows, listening to the same radio programs, or getting news from the same sources.
8) Our movies, music, and TV shows are provided by people who are almost universally hostile to conservatism, Christianity, and traditional American values.
9) We have stopped breaking up monopolies in this country and that has allowed mega-corporations to have an outsized and unhealthy level of influence on our political process. That's how corporations that make more money every sixty seconds than the average person does in a lifetime can rake in hundreds of millions each year in subsidies and be given access to billions of dollars’ worth of your money when they make dumb decisions that put their companies’ futures at risk.
10) Our country was founded on Judeo-Christian values and yet Christianity in this country is slowly retreating from Biblical principles, the Public Square, and American life in general.
11) Women becoming educated, moving into the work force and becoming much more independent has been a positive development. However, the downside of it is that it has led to later marriages, a soaring divorce rate, more out-of-wedlock birth, and much more conflict, discontent, and fights over children between the sexes. Marriage and relationships are an order of magnitude more complicated for Americans today than they were sixty years ago.
12) Gerrymandering, increasing partisanship, and a lack of term limits have allowed politics to become a lifetime job for a majority of members of Congress. The average congressman cannot be defeated by a member of the opposing party and only has to worry about making special interest groups on his own side angry enough to back a primary challenger against him. For most members of Congress, once they're elected once, they never have to worry about the voters in their own district again.
13) The differences between the Republican and Democratic Party have become so great that there is very little common ground anymore. Not only do both parties propose very different solutions to America's problems, but both sides also see the other side's solutions as taking the country in exactly the wrong direction.
14) Over the past few decades both parties, but particularly the Democrats, have given up on the idea that the government should have any sort of limits on what it spends, should be required to afford new spending, or should even try to pay back the money it already owes.
15) Schools have moved away from teaching reading, writing, history, morality, and patriotism for the benefit of the students to pushing self-esteem and liberal indoctrination for the benefit of the teachers’ unions and salaries of professors.
16) Our entire society is based on a Constitution that is being systematically ignored, distorted, and treated as optional by the populace, our politicians, and even the judges who are sworn to enforce it.
17) Our federal government has grown so far beyond the boundaries that were originally intended for it by the Founding Fathers that it intrudes and interferes into almost every facet of American life. Since the government is always slower, stupider, and less efficient than the private sector it feeds off to grow, this leads to an inevitable decline.
18) The Democratic Party's entire electoral strategy is based around giving people money and goods that they didn't earn and ginning up hatred between different groups of Americans.
19) As the standard of living in America has increased and globalism has made having manual labor done in foreign countries more economical, highly paid, low skill level jobs have mostly either been replaced by technology or have moved offshore to nations with cheaper labor. This means that a large number of men who could have once held "good" jobs that could have provided a living for them and a family now are barely able to take care of themselves and they also have poor future prospects in an economy that now favors highly educated, heavily skilled workers.
20) Race and ideology-based tribalism is becoming the norm. Different racial and political groups often have completely different standards, moral codes, and types of behavior depending on whether the person they're dealing with is a member of their own "tribe."
By : John Hawkins
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