Easter Island party

after reading about Easter Island in j. diamond's book collapse, chilling parallels with the USA are obvious.
the islanders were encouraged to build larger and yet larger monuments to their gods as manifest be the ever increasing size of the well known monuments found at the ruins of these sites after their collapse. actually they destroyed each other's monuments over time and when the first Europeans arrived few if any remained upright.
this society began in the lap of luxury with rich endowments of forests and wildlife on the island. they lived in shelters apparently of wood and stone and reproduced rapidly.
after several hundred years they had consumed every stick of wood and most wildlife had been eaten leaving them to slowly starve. they of course began fighting over the last scraps, including cannibalism, and were reduced to living in fortified caves under constant siege from each other, like human wolf packs.
America along with the rest of the planet is on a quest to consume the resources as rapidly as possible and with ever improving technology we feel that success is recovery and consumption of those resources more rapidly than our neighbor, and borrowing money to consume even more than we ourselves can produce.
i see little discussion about the fact that this "success" most assuredly can not continue forever.
obviously if a nation continues spending more than it makes, a day or reckoning will arrive and how can it be managed if we are out of resources.
most folks find it easy to party as the ship sinks and maybe that impending doom actually accelerates the party and causes them to ignore the inevitable.
but what can be done to motivate societies to sober up and face the future with actions that ensure their long term survival?
democracy encourages shallow platitudes from candidates that the electorate wants to hear vs. the facts which guarantee a candidates failure at the polls.
examples:
Americans are the greatest and most intelligent people in the world who have an ever more prosperous future ahead. they do mention that our spending is unsustainable but that they have a plan to easily manage the fiscal train wreck.
when they get elected the congress never introduces legislation which actually increases taxes enough nor cuts spending enough to bring back our balance of trade.
to do so would result in too much financial pain to be re-elected and would be ignored if such measures did get passed as we have seen in the Medicare program.
does anyone out there have any idea how a democracy can protect itself from certain destruction by over consumption, not to mention the rest of the planet.
voters simply do not have the will to face problems with solutions painful enough to solve the issues of the day.
An Easter Island crash seems inevitable for us all with the last ones standing hunkering down trying to kill each other for the few gallons of oil and trees remaining to withstand the nuclear and environmental calamity we have created.
an ugly picture to imagine but is there any sign that humans can become enlightened enough to limit consumption of goods and services to match what the planet can produce without the alternative of wars, disease and starvation?
optimism suggest that Americans will elect candidates who promise to life within our means, even if we must stop wars, reduce consumption, balance our trade, restrict medical to what we can afford and live lives within our means.
but so far the electorate wants congressmen who continue to prosecute wars that they claim will pay for themselves and explain away negative balance of trade as some temporary phenomenon which will cure itself.
what is the answer? i wish i knew.
uncle steve