The Great Moral Divide

A couple of days ago I wrote a rather long piece about morality and the law. To put it simply, every single law ever enacted is an attempt to force someone's version of morality onto whoever is being affected by that law. In a republic like ours the laws are supposed to be a reflection of the moral code of the people and their leaders. I happen to believe that the vast majority of Americans, whether they be religious believers or not, share a somewhat similar morality based on Judeo-Christian principles. I also happen to believe that an alarming number of so called "elites" in the government, the media, big business and academia operate under a radically different code, based on atheistic utilitarianism.
I think the vast majority of people in this country would agree that lying (under most circumstances) is bad. Atheists don't like liars any more than devout Catholics do. Yet our elected leaders (of both parties) lie constantly. They are expert liars. Their lies are so large and so numerous that most of us wouldn't believe them if they told us the sky was blue and the grass was green. We even expect them to lie. They lie, and then lie about lying. (How do you know when a politician is lying? His lips are moving.) The news media is just as bad. Anyone in the news media who says they are unbiased or objective is full of crap. Only an ignorant fool really believes that entities like MSNBC or Fox News are either fair or balanced. They are neither and we know it and watch anyway. Why do they lie? Their moral code is different from ours. For them the truth doesn't matter at all. For them, gaining power is the only good, losing power is the only bad.
How do they get away with it? Ignorance and apathy. Most Americans are now completely ignorant when it comes to history, economics and political science. Ask the average American if they know the difference between socialism and Free Market Capitalism and his eyes will glaze over. Ask her how a bill gets passed into law or how a person gets appointed to the Supreme Court and they will stare at you with a slack jaw and shrug their shoulders. Heck, most Americans probably don't know who we fought against in World War II. We don't know, and we don't want to know. I've said before that we are fat, dumb and happy. We don't care anymore. Unless if affects us directly (and then it's too late) we just don't give a damn. And because we don't know the important things anymore, these folks, whose only moral good is to increase their own power, can tell us anything and we won't know the difference. We don't know history, so they can make the same stupid decisions that caused so much trouble the last time. We don't know how our economy works, so they can do things that cost us our very livelihoods and we have no idea why or how it happened. We don't hold them accountable. We just keep electing them. Their power grows, and our freedoms diminish.
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: "from bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage." - Alexander Frazier Tytler 1776