Virtue and Herd Survival

 The herd will lose its countries, its cultures, its race, all personal identities, and anything resembling history. It will, however, survive genetically in some sense. Enough herd members will blend into the new favelas that the needle will budge a few notches.

 And that's the point of herd behaviour. Survival...in some sense.
 Indeed being so deeply camouflaged they can't recognize themselves is perhaps a point of pride. If they can't pick themselves out of a crowd, how can the predator single them out? If historians claim you no longer exist, then nobody can come after you for the slights of your previous shepherd. Convenient. 

 When rome fell, 90% of the city's population vanished somewhere. That means 10% was still there. Score!
 By the way, recent studies found late rome was only ~4% made of the original latins, meaning 0.4% of the original population was still around in any sense. That's not zero. It's plenty, if you're a member of a herd of prey species. "Mustard seed." Sure the predation was really bad [[this time around]], but that's exactly why it was so important to get so many herd members. History repeats because it's working as intended.

 A certain amount of virtue is required to survive the coming slow-motion turmoil due to, you know, your own virtues, and not due to the virtue of the cockroach. There are several negligible-risk Exit pathways. Strategy works because security is affordable. However, finding and using these pathways is nontrivial. 

 In particular, you do in fact have to be a rightist. No american is so much as centrist; every single last one is unquestionably a leftist. A herd-mortal would genuinely rather die than become a pack-mortal. It is not enough that they will cheerfully embrace their statistical destruction. They will violently oppose anyone who suggests they build enough virtue to survive due to their own actions rather than due to dumb luck. That's why they're not merely prey, they are prey moralists. They sometimes like to try to use predator rhetoric to express this. "We will crush you! (Beneath our hooves, in a stampede.)" It's even sort-of true: if the shepherd drives the sheep aggressively enough, the predator can only flee. If enough predators existed to overwhelm the stampede, the predators would quickly starve, stampede or no stampede. Although subsequently the herd is too exhausted to flee the wolf's jaws...

 Yet, precisely because the herd has to inveigh so hard against predator rhetoric demonstrates they see some way they could discard their sheep nature. Although unlikely, it is possible to rise above the americanism soup. The moralist herd has to tell you nontrivial means impossible precisely because it's not impossible, even for the prey.