1) Cheap Borrowed Money: On an intellectual level, most Americans may be able to comprehend that the country is in deep financial trouble, but they’re not feeling the squeeze. Part of that is because Western Europe is having its own financial troubles and it’s driving cheap borrowed money here, but it’s also because the Fed is playing sleazy financial games to cover up our weakness. Interest rates are being kept artificially low and in 2011, the Fed bought 61% of our debt. So, we have a 16 trillion dollar debt we can’t pay for, we’re running a trillion dollar plus deficit a year, people from both parties say it’s “unsustainable,” and yet the public isn’t being forced to make any hard choices at all. Essentially, the only thing of significance we’ve agreed to cut in the last four years is the military budget and both Obama and Romney agree those cuts will never happen. It’s hard to convince the public that there’s an impending crisis when Republicans are calling for tax cuts, Democrats are calling for more spending and everything seems to be humming along just like it always has.

2) A Style Over Substance Mentality: One of the great ironies of modern American life is that as the number of news sources Americans have access to have proliferated, news organizations have become more and more enamored with covering gaffes and clever put-downs to draw an audience in an increasingly competitive market as opposed to hard news. As a result, increasingly, Americans seem to be less willing or perhaps even less able to comprehend the crucial issues that confront the country. Barack Obama, to his everlasting shame, has taken full advantage of this trend. In 2008, his campaign was about “Change,” “Hope,” “Unity,” and in 2012 it has been “Big Bird,” “Binders,” and Bayonets.” If we become so shallow as a people that elections are primarily decided by trivia instead of the issues that will really determine the fate of our nation, then ultimately we’re doomed to fail.

3) A Left-wing Takeover of Colleges, the Media, and Hollywood: The Left has completed its “long march through the institutions” and now it owns Hollywood, colleges, and the mainstream media. People tend to notice Hollywood stars spouting off, but Hollywood is really effective because it habitually treats far left-wing beliefs as the cultural norm while Christian and conservative beliefs are almost always portrayed as backwards and mean-spirited. In our colleges, Communists, terrorists, and far left-wingers indoctrinate naïve students with a poisonous miasma of liberal beliefs. Meanwhile, most of the mainstream media, from The New York Times, the Washington Post, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, etc., etc., etc. act as press flacks for the Democratic Party. Whatever story the Democrats want out there, they push it. Stories that are bad for the Left are either completely ignored or treated as insignificant. When conservative state legislators help fund public colleges that teach kids to hate them and conservatives watch TV shows, movies, and cable news networks that smear their beliefs over a morning paper that mocks God and looks down its nose at people with traditional values, it’s no surprise the Left has a huge advantage. Vladimir Lenin once said, “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them,” and today, conservatives are funding the very people who are hanging our country by the neck until it dies.

4) Racial Polarization: Democrats start every election with 90% of the black vote and roughly 65% of the Hispanic vote as a given. Some of this is based on issues. Black and Hispanic Americans are more likely than other Americans to be poor and impoverished Americans are more likely to find the Democrats’ offers of free goodies to be appealing. However, much of it is cultural and the fruit of the liberal strategy of falsely calling Republicans racist. In fact, that’s pretty much the ONLY thing Barack Obama has had to offer to black Americans. They’ve gone backwards economically, illegal aliens have taken jobs that would have gone to black Americans, and Obama has fought against God’s definition of marriage and school choice, both of which are popular with African-Americans. It’s not much better for Latinos. Helping illegal aliens to stay here doesn’t help American Hispanics; to the contrary, it hurts all low income workers and costs the middle class money. The only people who really benefit are corrupt business owners who get below market labor and liberal politicians who eventually want to turn illegals into votes. Yet, as long as the Republicans refuse to do serious outreach and liberals can keep locking up huge percentages of the vote just by crying racism, they’ll keep getting a much larger share of the black and Hispanic vote than they deserve based on their performance in office.

5) Entitlement Culture: Because America has done so well for so long, we’ve started to embrace a “participation trophy” mentality.

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