To get started, enshrine ignorance and elevate folly. Elect people to high office who don't know much about history, for instance, and then let them have pretty much unfettered powers free from the checks and balances that were originally concocted in order to keep things from getting ruined.

Be sure that your children graduate from school and enter adulthood even more ignorant of their history than their leaders are, and be sure that they are equally clueless about their system of government.

Undermine confidence in the significance of voting by clouding election results.

Elect people to govern who don't believe government is a good thing. Such elected representatives will, then, ensure that government fails to fulfill its functions because when government does exhibit such failures, those elected representatives have proven their point.

Instill passivity in the populace. In a democracy, for instance, a passive electorate will accept the subversion of the government bureaus instituted to serve the people's interests. When, for example, functionaries are put in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency who are actively hostile to the environment, a passive nation will countenance such an egregious betrayal of public trust.

But, if you are intent on ruining your nation, don't stop at one or two such agencies. Be sure that the Department of Justice is run by people who are fuzzy on the concept of justice, and that the people named to be in charge of guarding the nation's public airways and media outlets are actively working for media monopolists who restrict the public uses of those airways and outlets.

Be sure that your intelligence-gathering agencies spend much of their time spying on the citizenry, and that any foreign intelligence they turn up is first weighed and evaluated for possible political consequences to those in power. Intelligence inimical to the interests of those in power shall be excised or redrafted accordingly.

This same approach should also be applied to the findings of scientists. When and if scientific evidence reveals data injurious to political or pecuniary interests of the nation's rulers, then that science will be identified as junk and will, accordingly, be junked in favor of science purchasable from science vendors already in corporate employ.

Trivialize news and information until reporting about the activities of minor entertainment figures is equal to reporting about the decisions that are affecting the lives of the citizenry.

Employ a network of disinformation specialists on radio and TV whose role it is to simplify all matters of national consequence, and to turn global disputes into clashes of good and evil, with all acts of your government cast as good, and all contrary acts portrayed as evil. If you have created a sufficiently ignorant populace through the work of your schools and your media, such a rendering of reality will be readily accepted by the governed.

If possible--and it is always possible--create an external threat, and use that threat to sow a permeating atmosphere of fear. Tweak this fear whenever it is necessary to distract the public from anything you want to escape their attention.

And keep that public attention scattered and antic. Manipulating the various media will make this easy, as will the endemic obsession with celebrities and trendiness fostered and fed by those media.

Intrude religion into all public discourse as often as possible, and blur the distinctions between church and state. This has multiple advantages. Religion can be used to bathe the most venal acts in heaven-sanctioned righteousness. Religious zealots can be counted upon to respond to the code phrases that indicate that the nation's leaders share their zealotry, and religious disputes can also serve as a distraction from the things that put the aims and desires of the powerful ahead of the interests of the country.

Always manipulate the language, affixing labels to those who oppose your policies, repeating those labels in negative contexts until each of them retains the power to convey evil or harm simply by invoking them.

Positive connotations are as useful as negative connotations, so select words that associate policies with generally cherished values and attitudes. If you wish to strengthen domestic spying, for instance, push your objectives by lumping such activities under rubrics like "homeland" or "security," the kinds of words no one is ever against.

Waste is profit. Maintaining power--and ruining a perfectly good nation--is dependent upon waste because government waste generates the profits that line the pockets of those whose largesse keeps you in power.

The biggest bull in the herd of sacred cows is the military. Bolster that bull land gild that sacred cow. The gilding of the military begins and ends with the image of the foot soldier, the grunt, the G.I. Once "our boys," or "our brave men and women in uniform" have been properly gilded and enshrined, it is imperative that you associate yourself with those soldiers in every way you can, always taking pains to blur the distinction between the soldiers and the politicians who have put them at risk. One way to accomplish this blurring is by highly publicized behind-the-lines visits to media-friendly sites where you can be photographed sharing a safe meal with soldiers before hastening back to the nation's capital.

Always amplify division between people and contending interests, driving wedges between races and ethnic groups, remembering to pit working people against one another whenever possible--and it's always possible. Xenophobia will trump self-interest if you have been successful at maintaining the level of ignorance necessary to ruining the country for the benefit of yourself and your powerful associates.

Provide no models for emulation. Turn athletes into overpaid hucksters and drug abusers, and turn youth culture into a megaphone for the disaffected and the defeated, make everything venal and ripe for cynicism, turn the anger of the dispossessed back in on themselves in ways that market self destruction and self-punishing rebellion for the profit of media moguls. Make idealism uncool and unpopular. Channel the resulting spiritual hunger into illegal but readily available drugs, or into the evangelical religiosity that preys on the desire to have prayers heard for profit, or the aggrandizement of the merchants of messianic mercies.

Pump the people full of high fructose corn syrup, injecting the stuff into nearly everything they eat until they are as swollen as ticks, barely able to squeeze themselves into oversized gas-swilling SUVs for their pilgrimages to the big box stores that sell them all their overworked hearts desire.

Export jobs; import goods; borrow heavily from unreliable allies and trading partners. Ensure the indebtedness of future generations. Balance no budgets, but pass on the costs of war profiteering and government contracted waste to the children and grandchildren of the taxpaying classes. Spend taxpayer money as if there's no tomorrow, and live accordingly, indifferent to any concept of a healthy heritage that would mark your time here, guaranteeing that your memory will occupy a bleak and resentful place in the hearts of those who come after you, left with the debt and the mess you've bequeathed to them.