What you correctly refer to as "garbage," is now the very fabric of American Culture. THe school system began its inexorable collapse in the 1950's and has continued until Western Christian Culture, American Version, is alive and well in the hands of a very few. It is a dead subject for study by a very small elite, who lead a war to destroy it by interpreting it as evil, or worse, inconsequential, to the masses. Jack, the plan is for us to become de-tribalized. If you want to see what that looks like, take a gander at post-colonial Africa. It's just going to take us a couple of centuries more to reach that state.
I cannot guess what the follow-on to Communism will be, but the techniques and design are going to be the same. For the foreseeable future, Americans will remain clean, well fed, well supplied with material goods, but becoming more profoundly ignorant with each generation, will be progressively more easily led. Where? That's the question.
Yep. If you look at the rampant ignorance in our schools, where learning is trumped, in many cases by political correctness and "multicultural" pettifogging, you'll see the early fruits of the leftist agenda. Already we're falling behind in math and the sciences. Engineers are rarer than honest Democrats. Kids don't know the capital of their own state, let alone the first thing about the Bill of Rights. They can recite the lyrics to Fitty Centz' new babble, but they don't know the words to the national anthem. And the ACLU continues its purge of God from the public square.
Yep, the future is pretty bleak if we don't wake up.