Rome, Europe, America -- Living In A Corpse

http://townhall.com/columnists/kurtschlichter/2016/03/28/for-america-the-fall-of-the-roman-empire-is-the-best-case-scenario-n2139579/page/full

The decline covered in the linked article is old news to readers of this blog -- I found the following paragraph to be especially well put.

And now our civilization is likewise demonstrating its own shortness of breath, with Europe a few decades ahead of us on the downslope. Europe is utterly exhausted. It believes in nothing – its churches are empty and that hopelessness has translated into a demographic death spiral. Europe does nothing new and merely feeds off of the fading triumphs of the last century. Its politics are frozen in a cycle of failure even as the barbarians it unwisely invited into its midst establish their own internal kingdoms. The elite is no longer composed of citizen-soldier-politicians in the mode of the ancient Roman patricians, or even the modern Winston Churchill. Instead, it is all bland bureaucrats, terrified of losing power and using their regulatory cudgel to squelch the unrest by marginalizing the unsatisfied and outlawing the speech of the uncooperative.