It is a nation of cowards and sheep, run by a cabal of lifetime D.C. bureaucrats who will do anything to maintain and expand their power.

The states are managed by feckless yuppies who live to enrich themselves and their offspring, and the occasional civic-minded public official is looked at with awe, like a unicorn, and held up as an example of a functioning republic by people desperate to erase the fact that they've been deluded all their lives, fooled by history and groping for long-dead ideals.

And it's really always been this way.