As we face an unprecedented election, not only with two clownish candidates, but with nothing but clowns behind them, the Two-Party Cartel has reduced national politics to a mental hospital of incoherence. Our empire no longer represents liberty or democracy: or even international law. Our wars no longer rest on historical claims, but willful forgetting. Our system is breaking down, and our minds. The incoherence is reflected in positions taken; rhetoric and style have been unbundled from action. A great irony; Trump, though acting like Mussolini stylistically, was a less warlike administration than Biden/Harris, with respect to both Russia and China. The “pivot to China” was Obama’s move. Trump, oddly, interferes with the war program of the US, therefore also with the global system, signaling the decline of US global power. Inversions come with collapse. The empire is a psychological crutch, and a trap, for Americans: letting go of Pax Americana, shrugging off envy of China’s newfound (false) glory, and a loss of a (false) sense of U.S. greatness. Though Americans have never held this imperial power, we cling to it psychologically, symbolically, like pretending an abusive parent means well. The totem of our domestic pecking order, this imperial psychosis became our national religion. In the performance of this religion, we have failed to keep its founding principles: freedom, democracy. Not only have we failed to keep the ideals of that order in our foreign dealings, but we have ceased to keep them within our own country. That’s why we have widespread propaganda, surveillance and censorship. We sacrificed our own ideals - allegedly in order to convert other nations to them. When the Cold War ended, the spy state should have stopped, but it didn’t. COINTELPRO became Homeland Security, Facebook, Google. The ongoing Cold War crusade has failed, as a strategy, both to convince the Third World, who now despise us as hypocrites for our endless war, but has also fundamentally undermined America as a coherent civil society with any idea of our purpose. It’s as if a nation created by a statement of principles never had such ideals. They have become platitudes on longer lists of platitudes. This has made our politics completely dysfunctional: a speech disorder jealously guarded by the Two-Party system, as evidenced by having to choose between two presidential candidates who are merely two different kinds of platitudinous liars: one polite and one rude. Our problem is older than this election. It’s older than Trump, older than Biden. Before Trump you had Bush II. Bush II was probably the greatest war criminal in American History, still now painting portraits back in Texas of American soldiers maimed in Iraq, and Secretary Powell who lied about the presence of Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, recently buried with bipartisan honors, not to mention the Kissenger-kissing Clintons, themselves guilty of illegal militaristic intervention. On the Democrats’ side, before Biden, you had Obama, who strangely got the Peace Prize then invented drone warfare, transforming the global military construct, known for his “Tuesday meetings” and his “kill lists.” Bill Clinton was the destroyer of worlds, the empowerer of China, the betrayer of (briefly) democratic Russia - the framer, in the image of Ronald Reagan, of the No Exit disaster in which all Americans eke out a miserable political existence, while our domestic economic existence continues to degrade into jelly and the world spirals into chaos. You have to be really ignorant not to know how much damage was done under our watch. It took a lot of work to make you that ignorant. It took amnesia. There are those who compare today to World War I: the recurring outbursts of anti immigration political positions to reduce or stop immigration. Immigration was caused before WWI by globalization, particularly in imperial regions like the Habsburg Empire where there was massive displacement of rural peoples in the eastern regions of Europe before and after the dawn of the 20th century: refugees, migrants, and migrant workers who presented a threat to labor unions and rights. But also in Germany. German communities in Vienna and Berlin, with powerful labor organizations were threatened by emigrant labor, decades before Hitler: a precursor. WWI started when the imperial system made possible an incoherent sequence of diplomatic maneuverings that locked the actors into an insanely destructive, uniquely meaningless war. There was no reason for the war. It had no good guys and no bad guys. Unlike WWII, which was centered around ideology, WWI was distinguished by a total lack of ideology. Imperial powers were acting in their strictly imperial interest. They used nationalist ideology. Former socialists in Germany, France, and England, formerly the penultimate enemies of war and nationalism, suddenly lost their religion and marched with their respective armies, annihilating each other in an eclipse of reason. Like the imperial nations of WWI, our endless wars have no reasons or principles, such as freedom, democracy or international law, but instead are merely commercial and annihilative. They are cynical: evil. In our minds, they have betrayed, destroyed, and discredited all the original ideals of the American Republic. In service to the commercial empire of Wall Street, the U.S. government has suppressed our native constitutional traditions, habeas corpus and the freedoms of speech, association and the press. Both by manipulation of the press for geopolitical purposes, and allowing concentration of ownership of the media - from mergers and acquisitions to new internet monopolies and cartels - the political parties have empowered the funders of their political campaigns to have direct control of language itself, now using it to not merely propagandize but censor citizens - and choreograph public discourse. The internet has made it so that you don’t even know when you are censored. You write something and post it, but it is not published due to an artificially intelligent machine’s assessment. It was hard enough to have democracy with the rich owning the newspapers and TV news shows at the top, true for a long time; but today public discourse is broadly controlled down to the lowest level: the level of you, yourself. Anyone who posts anything offensive to the internet program is subject to unprecedented levels and layers of surveillance, censorship, and incrimination, without as much as a person doing it or notice given. You know it changes you. The thought processes and direct speech of every citizen is being controlled. That is why American public discourse is incoherent, and why representative government in America is a sham: because it represents nothing. The Republic has been captured. We are tied into the bound paralysis of our generation and the bureaucracy that it represents, whether in business or government. The deadpan mechanical march toward destruction, the seeming impossibility for anyone to interrupt that march, and the categorical unwillingness of anyone in power to even acknowledge it, traps every American in voyeurism. We watch ourselves marching toward the existential cliff - climate change, WW III. With them, all the different forms of epochal destruction overwhelm the intellect with a sense that it is too late. Human life, animal life, plant life have been degraded in the past century, but even more so exponentially in the last half century and even more than that in the past twenty-five years. As we destroy, we are destroyed, our society and our qualitative existence as humans is our incoherence, depression, fits of hysteria. We have been driven mad. In this final stretch of destruction, our robotic leaders seem determined to make an About Face impossible. Trapped in public hysteria, lost in a TV spectacle that is our death mask, we must find our feet. The evil dream of an American empire - the “Empire of Liberty,” to quote Christopher Britt - led us to this epochal catastrophe. Will you even recognize it before it’s over? Can you snap out of it? We have to wake up and smell the roses. Unlike World War I, triggered by the assassination of an Archduke, the election of 2024 is a crisis of democracy. It is the result of the failure of America’s modern democratic system - its corruption by the rich, its demoralization by imperialism - to poison the American people, toxify the land and water, and annihilate the local economies and communities in every city and town in America, white brown and black. Corrupted by the rich, American society has been irreversibly displaced, its history annihilated, a catatonic Leviathan. For Wall Street, the maiden, we now fail to witness or respond to global extinction and endless wars. Nation states are modeled on the USA, all over the world. Like us, they believe in representation and the abstractions of our mega-states. Our problem is not unique, because we have forced it on the world since the Cold War followed WWII. It is nationalism: the fanatical support of one’s national government against other national governments. Enveloped in the dysfunctional institutional environment of the Two-Party system and corporate media, all we USAers understand about politics is the national, and of that its “highest office.” All we understand, really, is just the presidency. This is a slave’s idea of democracy. Though the world’s oldest Republic, America has rendered its citizens into small children. We’re poorly prepared to participate in self-rule, not only because we are oppressed by oligarchs, but because we don’t really pay attention to ruling ourselves and don’t care about it, in fact. This has been true for generations. I say “we” not I - we as a collective, the normal American people - do not care about the destruction that our nation state has brought about at home and abroad. But Americans do like to chat about the presidential candidates, celebrities and criminals, argue about them but certainly not do anything about them. In all likelihood, you have ignored all real politics utterly, for your whole life: local politics, state politics and the U.S. House of Representatives, which might claime to be “representative” of voters. The past and present of real democracy is obscure to you, while every personal habit or detail about the Presidents and would-be Presidents are familiar to you. These are empty rituals of care, but unfortunately they are also the constitutional basis for all actions of the State. Empty. This is the moral side, the moral problem, for America’s president. When Gorbachev ended the Warsaw Pact and the communist system in effect put down the gun - we could have reciprocated, and ended domestic spying and social control in the US. We could have acknowledged and responded toTiananmen Square, when the Chinese crushed the democracy movement by killing twenty thousand Chinese democrats with tanks in the middle of the capital. Instead, only months later, Bill Clinton gave China its new role in America, Most Favored Nation status and the deep unraveling of American jobs and producer-status. Americans share a common guilt as we face the end of democracy, what we call the “Last Election,” a crisis perhaps never rivaled in the United States government. But this guilt isn’t just white guilt, it isn’t just European guilt, it’s universal guilt. We have collectively adopted the ideals of democracy and the republic, whether in the 16th century, the 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th or 21st. This is not the past. You have not put it behind you. We’re all struggling with so-called “English” patterns of behavior because those ideas - like representative government - are what the modern republic is made of, and your every idea is made of them. No matter what your color, race, or origin, you bow to the idols of the state. What is new is technology, and the destruction it has caused. The industrial power of human populations that the English industrial revolution started, and the anthropocene world it has created, have virtually completed the destruction of the earth. America’s national ideology is in a crisis because we have not internalized the meaning of a man-made world, in our plastic clothes and drug dependent state, we embody it. Increasingly complex problems interfere with just going to work and having a good life, just voting perfunctorily - while corruption and tyranny run violently amok in our names, killing millions and driving hundreds of millions from their destroyed countries worldwide, causing the migrant crises in both Europe and the U.S. The self destructiveness that is demonstrated by the American system is so overwhelming as to cause profound grief, a grief we feel but cannot understand because it results from both our economic policy of globalization and our foreign policy of empire. We are so wrong, and have been for so long, we cannot face it. Meanwhile, failed democracy of the American Republic only increases the danger we all face, from relentless injustice, inequity, liberalization, deregulation, concentration of sectors, financialization of industries, deregulation of finance, resumption of nuclear weapons: it is the unshackling of oligarchic power and the annihilation of basic, original republican and democratic principles. We need to drop the imperial obsession of presidential politics to give our thoughts and feelings to something more real: on something that might succeed, versus 75 years of global overdevelopment to enrich Wall Street. We cannot really complain in this apocalyptic way, because the apocalypse already happened. It was Gulf War II. It is rising seas. It is extinction. We cannot believe our eyes. We are pretending that it didn’t happen, and we’re pretending that it isn’t our fault. We voted for that person, and now we’re gonna vote for this person. It’s a failure to realize you are not mentally competent. In this amnesia, this willful amnesia of the American public means never taking responsibility for its mistakes. In a republic, “their” mistakes are your mistakes.You supported the Iraq invasion when you believed in Weapons of Mass Destruction, you supported the Afghanistan invasion for twenty years at a cost of one trillion dollars only to return the country to the control of the Taliban in 2021; you supported the attacks on Serbia, the attacks on North Africa and the Levant. Afghanistan and the Sudan - neutral countries - were attacked with cruise missiles under Clinton on the day his sex scandal was exposed in1997, hunting Bin Laden. This violation of airspace was the model the 9/11 terrorists mimicked. In your name the U.S. military has bombed and starved millions of people, mostly noncombatants. It’s getting harder and harder to deny the apocalypse because of climate change, as it is a visible and felt metric. The knowledge that we have had that it would happen, and the knowledge we have today that it is happening, somehow still prevents us from stopping it. A profound dysfunction is visible. This sleepy, dreamy, imperial, childlike condition persists among us; and it is the real crisis of the 2024 election. It is not simply a Republican problem. it is not simply a Democratic problem. In fact it is a two party system problem, the problem of their duopoly, of our robotic elections, their long-term control of the presidential debates, their long-term control of the choices of presidential candidates, which we allow them to do because we cannot face our own failures - this willful amnesia and social cowardice. In the dream of our amnesia, we pretend to participate in democracy by picking one of two designated candidates - by consenting to Party control, we bow to the unconscious consensus of imperialism. During the Cold War we argued about the Nanny State: the Republicans are for Dad, and the Democrats for Mom. We cannot evolve, let alone imagine transformation, because we are afraid to say no to both of them. So we don’t move. In this sleep of reason, our energy turns inward to the private debates, the quasi-religious debates about culture: Democratic transgenderism, Republican fundamentalism and science-denial, Black Lives Matter vs Proud Boys. The ding-a-ling quality of this utopian fantasy world of a braindead empire, a failing empire as it happens which has provoked imperialism by countries formerly made humble before the threat of our imperialism, actually perpetuates and provokes imperialism by both Russia and China, when peace could have been achieved. America punished Russian democracy, and we rewarded and armed Chinese totalitarianism, locking and loading into the wholesale destruction of the domestic US economy in return for opening the global economy to Wall Street. A sacrifice. Did you feel it? Bush II’s fakery of Iraq’s Weapons of Mass Destruction in selling Iraq War II following 9/11 being the most obvious fiction, clearly demonstrated the passivity of the American public in not being outraged, not feeling betrayed, not reacting to the betrayal or gaining any knowledge from the disappointment of the betrayal - only mindlessly, increasingly believing every lie: any lie will do. True, the anti-war movement exploded, but as it was vastly underreported by the media, it eventually stopped, with the exception of a few lonely souls shouting at a deaf population. We are facing a moral crisis. It isn’t just an historical or ideological problem. The problem is that we are culturally, highly capable of duplicity, where you say one thing and do another. We all do it, and our leaders do it well. This is a moral failing on a vast and catastrophic scale. We believe ourselves to be one thing, yet do another. Incredibly, after we do this, over and over again, we still don’t alter our self-image in response to moral failing. We maintain the very same self-image of Yankee Doodle, and become hypocritical and empty. We become evil. Now the Chinese and Russians think they can see through us, through the entire Western Tradition, and accuse the founding fathers of America of being somehow flawed. This psychotic reversal, echoed by China and Russia, exposes real hypocrisy on the part of Americans which, if we don’t fix it, proves their argument and cements our guilt. They say if that’s Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison, forget it, you can have democracy. If you can’t see your own failing in the American Republic because you are distracted by the unimportance of the Presidential election, then you fail to see the the legitimation crisis that is happening to the US right now: the turn away from NATO in French and German elections in recent months, the growth of the Non Aligned Nations becoming the world’s largest grouping of states worldwide, the growth of BRICs nations, and the alienation of the US from the United Nations and International Criminal Court, the dropping of US treasuries by China, the divestment in US dollars, all threaten America’s economic stability. This is the worldwide crash of American legitimacy that is hardly heard at home. But it’s ultimately about you, American citizen, lying to yourself. En masse. The world sees you. Game’s up. We have no word for the political force that has driven the bipartisan agenda, so we blame “billionaires” or “corporations,” our enablers and corruptors, who willfully assist us in our failure. But they are our foil, as it is we, and not the corruptors, who are responsible for allowing the failure to happen. To survive, we must question ourselves, our self-image and our most basic ideas. Our conception of democracy is a representative one, represented electronically, and our idea of living and survival is proletarian, amoral or immoral. Both need to be revised. Our economy is toxic. We have to learn from the manmade world we have created to be clearer about how it is we intend to survive. Failures have to be admitted to know what not to do again. But first, to acknowledge these failings and adjust our disappointment in Putin, Iran, China, and realize we have to deal with them on an equal level, having forfeited our superiority through hypocrisy, we must try to settle down the foreign activities of nation states which are so destructive. We need to focus the energies of government on domestic economic and civil reinvention, which is a 100% kind of job. We will stop the endless war, by stopping economic expansionism. We can only do this by focusing politics on the local. To change our purpose, we must replace one (war) with another (survival). We need new local economies built on natural resources to discontinue the immense pollution of energy systems. Americans need to deal with reality again; material, local reality, why you are alive, and might not be.