Pat Buchanan has a provocative assessment of the current political climate posted over at World Net Daily in which he asserts that American may be coming apart.

Given the growing dicension and unrest, I would have to agree with him. And we should have expected it. For several generations, American attitudes have been shifting between those who give and those who take; those who reap the benefits of government and those who pay for them.

It’s an attitude of entitlement and that everything other than life, liberty and property is a “right.”

We’ve been warned about this already many many years ago by a Scot named Sir Alexander Fraser Tytler when he supposedly said:

A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.

I’m not certain that Tytler had our situation in mind when he made his famous statement given that we are actually a Constitutional Republic, but I would have to agree that once a certain number of the population realizes that they can vote themselves into dependence on the state, we have a real problem.

I can easily see the other portion of the population revolting and collectively shutting down funding of the entire system. Already some conservative celebrities have suggested they’re gonna stop paying taxes into the system probably through tax avoidance (not to be confused with tax evasion). Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe they will be blatant in their refusal to fund the federal government. Regardless, I get a sense that those who have been funding the system are a day short from refusing to pay any more. And why should we expect anything but that when we’ve already escalated our everyday financial vernacular to the use of the word “Trillion” with a capital “T?”

I hope I’m wrong about this but I have a terrible gut feeling that our economic political and social system is about to collapse under the weight of entitlement.

If or when that happens, life in America will be very different. A post-American senario has already been predicted by Russian political science professor, Igor Panarin, but I don’t give total credence to his disintigration of the US hypothesis. We may be weak but not to the point where other countries rapidly infiltrate and balkanize us into six separate nation states. But his assertion that we are overwhelmed with financial turmoil and to a certain degree, moral degredation, does worry many of us.

Back to Buchanan’s column where he says:

We are not only more divided than ever on politics, faith and morality, but along the lines of class and ethnicity. Those who opposed Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court and stood by Sgt. Crowley in the face-off with Harvard’s Henry Louis Gates were called racists. But this time they did not back down. They threw the same vile word right back in the face of their accusers, and Barack Obama.

Consider but a few issues on which Americans have lately been bitterly divided: school prayer, the Ten Commandments, evolution, the death penalty, abortion, homosexuality, assisted suicide, affirmative action, busing, the Confederate battle flag, the Duke rape case, Terri Schiavo, Iraq, amnesty, torture.

Now it is death panels, global warming, “birthers” and socialism. If a married couple disagreed as broadly and deeply as Americans do on such basic issues, they would have divorced and gone their separate ways long ago. What is it that still holds us together?

The European-Christian core of the country that once defined us is shrinking, as Christianity fades, the birth rate falls and Third World immigration surges. Globalism dissolves the economic bonds, while the cacophony of multiculturalism displaces the old American culture.

“E pluribus unum” – out of many, one – was the national motto the men of ’76 settled upon. One sees the pluribus. But where is the unum? One sees the diversity. But where is the unity?

Sounds to me like our motto may be changing to “E Pluribus Discerpo” but I pray I’m wrong, if praying is still allowed.