A lot of people have been logging this over the last two years. And you know why? Because they look around themselves wherever they go, taking in the long-creeping malaise that's become unignorable, and cannot help but think the obvious: we live in a society that used to be a country. A proper country.

Nearly five decades ago, the young Californian director George Lucas had clearly intuited this. The current ruling class has made the prequels an instruction manual; with any luck, the successors to Gen Z will claim American Graffiti as their own.