Civilizations normally go through three stages; Barbaric, Vigorous and Decadent.

It's easy to find examples of barbaric and decadent civilizations. We can find all the barbaric civilizations to suit an entire faculty's worth of in the Middle East. And then back home we can see the decadent civilization that employs their kind to bemoan the West.

Vigorous is what America used to be when it was moving west, producing at record rates and becoming a world power. Decadent is what it is becoming.

[...]

The barbaric and vigorous civilizations speak little of sex and yet have high birth rates. Decadent civilizations are obsessed with sex and have few children. Perversions multiply in decadent civilizations, especially among the elites, who have the fewest morals, the most wealth and the greatest need for new taboos to violate. This is not a cause. It is only the symptom.

Gay marriage, like so much else, is the symptom of a decadent elite that confuses its own power and privilege with civil rights, that wants to legalize its illicit behaviors even though it only embarked on them because of their illicitness. In its perversity, it must find new taboos to violate each time an old one becomes socially accepted, before then embarking on a civil rights struggle to make its latest taboo socially acceptable so that one day it's gay marriage and the next it's men in dresses.

[...]

Decadence in a civilization can be reversed. While the barbarian civilization must evolve upward, the decadent civilization must undo the damage that is devolving it. This is easier than it seems. Unlike the barbarian civilization, the decadent civilization has most of the same infrastructure, physical and mental, of the vigorous civilization. Only its ideas have become corrupted.

And this even deeper corruption is largely limited to the elites and the professional classes, while the rest of the civilization has experienced only a surface corruption that is easily wiped away.

[...]

Removing the source of the corruption requires either removing all or almost all of the elites, and sizable sections of the professional classes as well. Or a campaign of ideas that transforms them as fundamentally as they were transformed.