It seems to me the American people do not know what is ahead. I think that's right. It seems to me the American people have changed, that they got off one road and are now confused which way to go. Some want to go one way, some a different way. The American people seem a bit hollowed out to me. What was in their soul, unquestioned devotion to the values of the Constitution, that soul has been eaten from within, like what cancer does and the body (politic) is vaguely, if at all, aware of the cancer and what it has eaten away. There was also a vague notion of a...Oh, maybe it doesn't arise to a "social compact"...maybe just a value, fairness, I think Americans, not too far distant, took being fair as one of their defining characteristics. "We are a fair people." I, at least, can hear us say that, believe that. There are certain things we just did not do, like take other people's territory. We weren't imperialistic. We just didn't do that. Vietnam was not about American imperialism, we didn't want Vietnam's rice paddies. We didn't want Middle Eastern oil enough to invade and seize the oil wells. It just wouldn't have been fair to do that. And we still don't do territorial imperialism. But there is not a consensus that the invasion of other countries electronically is either imperialist or unfair. We are seizing other countries property just as surely as if we physically invaded, but we don't see it that way. Electronic seizure is abstract to most Americans. We are getting more queasy about it, maybe, the polls seem to indicate that, but there is hardly a consensus. I don't think most Americans think what Edward Snowden revealed America was doing was so wrong. Edward Snowden was wrong, there's much more consensus on that. Americans are more concerned with the economic unfairness of the last forty or so years, since the "Me Decade" of the 1980's...but they revered, still revere, President Reagan, the architect of Me Decade economics. Economic fairness was turned on its head: it was no longer about fairness to the un-wealthy, it was about not "soaking the rich." The poor, not just the un-wealthy, could "vote with their feet" and move. It used to be in America you didn't demonize the poor so much, we did demonize them some, welfare has never had a good name but it wasn't fair to be contemptuous of them, at least not publicly. Now look at where we've taken it. We had a presidential candidate who demonized 47% of us as "takers!" That was a first. "To be rich is glorious," was Deng Xiaoping's maxim. He drifted a fair piece from communist China's notions of fairness, huh? Whooo-doggie. To be rich is glorious fits the 1980's and since in America quite well. It was never unfair to be rich in America as it was in China but we really bought into "a rising tide lifts all boats" maxim. It wasn't unfair to be rich if the bottom 99% improved some. But that wasn't happening. The rising tide was lifting only the yachts. And the 47% of us were written off as takers. So yeah, I think all of that adds up to the American people have changed. And that road ahead is beclouded and we're not even sure that we're on the right road or if we inadvertently missed a turn back there and are on the wrong road entirely. Some of us want to keep going, some of us want to turn back but none of us trust our inner compasses now. They got damaged, maybe destroyed entirely, by the cancer.