"Am I the only one who is heartsick at what has become of us as a nation.."
Read Alexander Tyler's quote on "fall of a democracy". I think you'll have a pretty good answer.
...actually, it's TYTLER:
“A Democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of Government. It can only exist until the voters discover they can vote themselves largess out of the public treasury. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that Democracy always collapses over a loose fiscal policy, always to be followed by a Dictatorship.” (Written by Professor Alexander Fraser Tytler, nearly two and one half centuries ago while our thirteen original states were still colonies of Great Britain. At the time he was writing of the decline and fall of the Athenian Republic over two thousand years before.)
"The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been two hundred years. nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependence; from dependency back again into bondage." – Alexander Fraser Tytler, English historian