The 21st century began with George W. Bush's stolen 2000 election. A year later America suffered the most devastating attack on its soil since Pearl Harbor. Bush launched the Twenty Years War in response and rode as a war president to reelection. 9/11 birthed a shadow legal system. the FISA court, private military contractors who did not have to follow the law, foreign torture sites like Guantanamo to avoid compliance with the Constitution, unprecedented spying on Americans by their government, the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression--We had not gotten better in managing capitalism in almost a century. We then elected one of our greatest presidents, Barack Obama, who steered us out of the economic meltdown and renewed and forged ties with foreign allies. But then another stolen election which no one saw coming, and the Catastrophe, which ended in, and probably because of, the outbreak of a virus that neither he nor his successor, Joe Biden, could bring to an end any better than Woodrow Wilson had the Spanish Flu epidemic in 1918/19. We have not gotten better in managing an epidemic in over a century.
We are less able to manage our affairs than at any time in our history. Democracy, like capitalism, is an engine that runs on the fuel of competition. We no longer have a competitive two-party system. The Catastrophe struck Democracy in America a fatal blow when it infected the Republican Party and transformed it into an authoritarian cult of personality. There is no longer an alternative to Biden but within one party. And right now, we are on the cusp of, and within days of surpassing, the estimated 675,000 killed by the Spanish Flu. Spanish Flu Conquest Day has arrived. America's era is at an end.
