Saint Carlin is almost always on, definitely always insightful. Where I diverge from the post title is the complete lack of nuance. Pretty much everything fucked in the United States is by explicit design.

Humanity has a few thousand years to perfect formulae for manipulating and subjugating the populace. The US embodies that refinement writ large. This miserable country never banned slavery; we just managed to shift the cost of ownership to the slaves. We successfully propagandized the populace, suppressed education and made it into a punchline (nerds vs jocks), and then convinced all the temporarily embarrassed billionaires that this is what freedom looks like.

So yeah ... what you're seeing in the US is the endgame of millennia of oligarchical refinement. This pattern repeats all throughout history. Given the title of this community, I suppose you can take some comfort that, from a historical perspective, the bill is going to come due for the US. I just hope that, given the extent of globalization, we don't take everyone else down with us.