The first presidential debate of the 2020 election was possibly the ugliest in the tradition's 60-year existence. It marked the latest of many low points on the sad descent into indecency, untruth, and the abandonment of the American people that began more than four years ago with Donald Trump's self-interested bid for the presidency. During last night's debate, the electorate was abused for 90 minutes as it witnessed a truly lamentable spectacle: what quickly became a schoolyard-fight between two vastly different men, each vying against the other not only for the highest of offices but for nearly polar-opposite visions of the country's future. It was a shameful occasion punctuating a shameful period in the United State's fraught history, marked foremost by a retreat from even the pretense of dignity into the shadows of iniquity. The Republic's 250-year rise to global hegemony is assuredly at a close; its rapid decline and fall is now underway. Behold the American experiment as it collapses under the weight of its own promise.