So I can wave the red, white, and blue all day with my TXSSAR membership, 2 flag triangles, and good life.. but still there are deeper, fundamental, metastasize

So I can wave the red, white, and blue all day with my TXSSAR membership, 2 flag triangles, and good life.. but still there are deeper, fundamental, metastasized cancerous problems with the shining city on the hill that have tarnished it. Greed. Corruption. Apathy. Ignorance. Narcissistic self-absorption (hyperindividualism). Unfocused leadership. Under such conditions of weak debate ethics and sensible balance, democracy gives oxygen to the crazies and drives policy and attention to satisfy the conspiracy theorists who demand a particular investigational outcome. It's not that free speech needs to go away, but that the leadership shouldn't kowtow to idiocy or even consider what's popular if it's existentially-vital. This can only be accomplished with ethical leadership, which I don't see happening anytime soon since celebrity straw puppets are typically installed to continue serving the interests of the 1%. If it were possible, leadership means putting on the Big Boy™ pants and not bending and shifting focus on the whims of idiots. There are no political figures anywhere that I've seen who aren't duplicitous, have a backbone, and are empathetic and sane individuals. Perhaps political parties and elections should be disbanded and revert to "jury duty" public administration for a fixed term (1 year) from a pool of random, qualified, competent professionals. Remember what a democratic idiocracy did to Socrates. "Democracy" is another word for "mob rule." Combine mob rule with vulture capitalism selling off public infrastructure to corporations and corruption, then you have basically the recipe for a third-world country fighting over the last scraps of what was once a nearly shiny city on a hill (minus the genocides, training of death squads, banana wars, and Monroe doctrine). The only way for the human species to survive is to crawl-out from under greed, dogma, conflict, laziness, material comfort, and ignorance and do many thing to defeat the threats to our very survival.