Having learned what happens when giant babies are elected to govern the United States, Americans are very disgusted with their government. They like the Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security and Obamacare and Prescription Drug Benefits, but they don't like democracy, which is a pretty weird way to run a country.

Today's grim new polls show that even Tea Party people are furious about the government shutdown, which was a stunt done by Tea Party people. Republicans are angry at each other, and Big Business somehow just realized that the GOP went from business-friendly moderates to slack-jawed sociopaths. Democrats blame the Republicans for everything, even as their own beloved president looks more and more like Richard Nixon: a paranoid and inept bungler who can't seem to turn an overwhelming mandate into success.

This republic has dragged on for a very long time, and once the Capitol is burned down, nobody will really miss it. That rich white people were expected to do their lobbying and governing from a poor black city with no government representation was always a cosmic prank, and few will mourn the end of the "federal city." But what's next?

Stability will be very important, for the rich. Without stability, currencies collapse and markets plunge.

The 84% of people who struggle to survive in this pit of dumbness and inequality will be encouraged to favor stability, too. A government shutdown is a threat, after all—not just against a president, but against every single person who relies on a functioning government for anything. Want your passport renewed or a billion-dollar Pentagon contract to keep your business going or public education for your kids or a few days in a national park before you go back to your unstable job? Then go along with the government, no matter how crooked and mean and poorly run it might be.

And then, suddenly, the government collapses and is replaced entirely by a new thing. This happens all the time, around the world, but we've been brainwashed into thinking America is Magic. Don't worry about a revolution. If you get killed, it was "your time." But you probably won't even be roughed up or put in a FEMA concentration camp.

In the past 25 years, a third of the world went from Soviet-style communism to various forms of capitalism, social democracy and even pure fascism. China went from an ostensibly communist state to state-run super capitalism. India and most of South America went far to the left. Mexico went from a century of one-party rule to a libertarian paradise of drug cartel narco-states alongside the more polished forms of globalized capitalism. The Islamic world churns in a constant crisis of invasion, occupation and revolution.

It's our turn.

Millions may be killed in house-to-house combat, what with the hundreds of millions of guns in this country, or people might just continue to stay inside with their TVs. California will likely join Oregon and Washington and maybe British Columbia, and the South will finally get to fly that Confederate Flag as it sinks deeper into poverty and environmental degradation. New York and coastal New England will probably unite as the Republic of Acela, while the fracking corporations will seize as much of the interior as they can. Life may be better or it may be worse or it may be roughly the same, with the very rich still very rich. (There will be no appreciable change in Florida.)

Still, America had lots of very rich people in the 1950s and 1960s, which is when America also conducted a brief experiment called "a prosperous middle class." Maybe we could try that again.

What's certain is that opinion polling will decide your new government structure, so you might as well start clicking the web surveys now:

[Photo via Getty Images.]