Episode 3: We Need to Talk About That Fucking Election that Just Happened - Part 1

We Need To Talk About...

In a different approach to a postmortem of the US 2024 Presidential Election I try to avoid focusing on the campaigning choices of each party and look instead at the systemic constraints that have made US presidential elections into a spectacle - a spectacle almost devoid of actual politics. The history of US presidential politics has been dominated by public sentiments about their policies on issues of war and peace, but the electoral politics have evolved to keep such issues well away from the ballot box.

I run through the history from Woodrow Wilson deceptively running as the antiwar candidate in 1916 under the slogan "He Kept Us Out of the War", while already intending to put the US into the War, to Lyndon Johnson running as the antiwar candidate while engineering a massive genocidal onslaught in Indochina.

In Part 2 I will explore the way in which US elections are constrained to produce only pro-empire, pro-genocide results and the way in which the system is simultaneously a means of controlling public opinion.