But like Germany, we will be changed, cheapened, chastened. We may continue to be a great nation, and a great civilization, but we will be deprived of our promise, of our true greatness. We will fail to reach the stars. The best we can hope for is a nation of shopkeepers.

France lost the war, but she continued on, a faded beauty, showing her age. Britain won the war, it was indeed her finest hour, but she was left alone and exhausted, left with little but her pride and her history and her memory.

America will be left with only a dream of what she might have been, desperately trying to preserve and redeem the few riches this brute and his accomplices left behind unspoiled.

If you want to know the America of the future, post-Trump America, study those ancient cultures of the last century--even Japan--an ancient colossus, an antique gem now surrounded and overshadowed by giants, playing some key, vital, yet still essentially quite small role in someone elses future.

We are seeing Spengler's Decline of the West unfolding before our eyes. When we are studied by future historians and students, what will most come to mind will be "What could they possibly have been thinking?"