We are screwed. We are marching toward stagnation, oppression and ruin and there is nothing that is going to stop the march. Sure, go vote Republican in 2010. That will slow the march a little bit, but we will continue slogging down the path to hell. Peggy Noonan explains in today’s Wall Street Journal.

The new economic statistics put growth at a healthy 3.5% for the third quarter. We should be dancing in the streets. No one is, because no one has any faith in these numbers. Waves of money are sloshing through the system, creating a false rising tide that lifts all boats for the moment. The tide will recede. The boats aren’t rising, they’re bobbing, and will settle. No one believes the bad time is over. No one thinks we’re entering a new age of abundance. No one thinks it will ever be the same as before 2008. Economists, statisticians, forecasters and market specialists will argue about what the new numbers mean, but no one believes them, either. Among the things swept away in 2008 was public confidence in the experts. The experts missed the crash. They’ll miss the meaning of this moment, too.

The biggest threat to America right now is not government spending, huge deficits, foreign ownership of our debt, world terrorism, two wars, potential epidemics or nuts with nukes. The biggest long-term threat is that people are becoming and have become disheartened, that this condition is reaching critical mass, and that it afflicts most broadly and deeply those members of the American leadership class who are not in Washington, most especially those in business.

It is a story in two parts. The first: “They do not think they can make it better.”

Yeah, they do think that. They are wrong. They can’t make it better. In trying, they are making it much, much worse. They are irrational. They chip away at the foundations of the nation and the economy believing that somehow the structure will remain hovering above the empty void they have created.

They destroy wealth each and every day. They corrode it. They erode it. They destroy it and then they go looking for more to debauch and destroy. They are predators feeding on entrepreneurial skill and industry. They are aggressive, parasitical hunters preying on wealth, individualism, self-reliance and independence. They impose dependency by stealing that which allows citizens to live independently of government support.

The incrementalism is relentless. The statists grow with each generation and the march is continuous. Sometimes we slow the march by electing a Reagan or a Gingrich congress, but it soon resumes at an increased pace. We never backtrack. We never stop. There is no stopping it. It is one way and it is mandatory.

We are governed at all levels by America’s luckiest children, sons and daughters of the abundance, and they call themselves optimists but they’re not optimists—they’re unimaginative. They don’t have faith, they’ve just never been foreclosed on. They are stupid and they are callous, and they don’t mind it when people become disheartened. They don’t even notice.