Your last three Presidents are liars,  war criminals, and completely lacking in any of the necessary qualities of statesmanship.   The first is a pathological rake; the second a fool (“useful  idiot”);  the third is barely American (foreign father and expatriate mother).

Such perspectives as liberalism, conservatism, libertarianism,  Catholicism,   may each have something valuable to contribute to the common good.   The trouble is that American public discourse inevitably turns  every  form of thought into its lowest common denominator:  idiot liberalism, idiot conservatism, idiot libertarianism, idiot Catholicism, etc., etc.

Clarence Thomas is an African-American.   Jesse Jackson is an African-American.  Barak Obama is not an African-American.  He  is  an English-speaking African.  Neither Obama nor his family  have  ever  suffered from discrimination or  from slavery   in the U.S.   (If, as is generally assumed, his forebears were Kenyan chieftains, then they were doubtless slave owners.)

Colin Powell is not an African-American in the true sense either, despite the Republican party having made a campaign out of appointing him the first “African-American” this and that.  His parents came from Jamaica long after slavery ended in the U.S.   He is, like Obama, partly white and, according to a common reference source, speaks Yiddish.   Far from having  suffered  discrimination,  nobody in the American government, with the possible exception of Chester A. Arthur, has ever been appointed to more high positions on the basis of so little accomplishment.

It is now an established fact that college students  majoring in media careers are even stupider than those majoring in Education.

Americans have not the slightest notion or concern that  a vast array of self-perpetuating , well-paid fakers control “higher education”   and that most of the immense sums they spend  are wasted.  Most Americans are apparently pleased, however, that the highest paid public official in almost every State is a football or basketball coach.

The Roman and British Empires, whatever their faults, left the world better off culturally.  The American Empire is reducing the whole world’s culture  to  mediocre, soulless,  commercial  entertainment.   Around the turn of the 20th century there was the possibility of the emergence of a genuine American high culture.  By the mid-twentieth century this possibility had disappeared as if it had never existed.   There will never be any future great American art, literature, music, scholarship, law, or political and military leadership.   There will be no master historian in the future, but if there was such a one, he or she would find a great subject in  explaining the decline and fall of the American Empire.