Maybe all of the political/financial turmoil we are experiencing is just the governments attempt to get us riled up enough to care again. Americans are typically slow to start on the collective-action front, ie every major conflict we didn’t start. So maybe the ruse is that the republicans are showing us the limits of the institutions we have taken for granted for so long in order to empower the younger generations to take action.
We as a society will never know our boundaries or overcome them if we don’t learn what the boundary is.