I constantly hear people say things like this, but I simply think it’s wrong. The US of today is far more democratic than it was when women and blacks could not vote and in various other ways were less than full citizens. Technology is decentralizing power. Not only unresponsive politicians, but also companies with bad business practices, can be called to account by having their misdeeds rapidly publicized via channels which neither they nor anyone else can control. This was not possible to anything like the same extent even ten years ago.

The mass public rebellion which stopped the illegal-alien amnesty bill stands as an example not only of democratic people-power organized rapidly via the internet (the term “techno-populism” has been suggested), but also of how vigorous and deeply felt our national identity and the national idea remain. Americans — not the political/media/business elites perhaps, but ordinary Americans — want our country’s borders and its citizenship to have real meaning, a hard and clear meaning. In Europe and Russia there is a rising level of popular anger against the violent and alien Muslim minority populations, rejecting the elites’ ideology of multiculturalism in favor of the national idea.

If technology had been frozen where it was in, say, 1980, we might indeed be stuck with the kind of trends you are describing, but this is a completely different world now.

I don’t know whether there has ever been a real atheist President (deists were not Christians, but they were not atheists either), and it’s not a realistic goal for the short-term future. I’ll settle for someone solidly secular who will re-assert separation of church and state. Religion is weakening generation by generation, despite the impressions created by the anomalous political conditions of the last decade or two. In time it will die out.