Sooner or later, all nations die. Rise and Decline shows that America has passed its peak in world prominence and is on the decline, identifies the core values that drove its ascendance, and shows that the reasons we're now in decline are not those so often offered up - corruption, national debt, weakening military, racial divide, poverty, etc., etc. These are merely symptoms of the root problems - growing indifference and disdain for America's founding values. Rise and Decline studies six of history's great democracies and republics - Ancient Athens, the Roman Republic, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, The French Third Republic, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. Four of these no longer exist, and the U.K. and U.S.A. are in decline. Citizen acceptance and support of specific principles is basic to the founding of every nation and drives its ascendance. Dishonoring and disdaining those principles leads inexorably to national decline and, ultimately, extinction. Abraham Lincoln once said, as regards the United States, America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves. America's raison d'être is liberty, as articulated in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, especially the Bill of Rights. These values are being usurped by our government and eschewed or disdained by citizens. Unless this erosion is halted or reversed in ways described in Rise and Decline, the end of the United States will arrive sooner, rather than later.
