the summer of our discontent

It was Americans’ reverence for their traditional two-party system] that blinded them when it foundered once and for all on the inherent contradictions of liberal “democracy” soon after Barack Obama took office. The people’s desire for instant gratification, their willingness to elect dangerous demagogues, and the venality and contentions of their leaders all had rendered the American decline inevitable. ... The pampered youth of the American bourgeois classes came to believe that their mere attendance at rallies and the symbolic choices they made between factions in the election booths constituted a movement—even a sort of revolution. –Li Xian The Dragon Rising, The Chinese Century, HARPERS July 2009, 33-34