"The U.S. public loves to imagine itself as one election away from redemption.
That fantasy is one of the empire’s most useful products.
It allows every crime to be reclassified as temporary deviation instead of structural expression.
Four years later the bombs continue, the sanctions continue, the vetoes continue, the bases remain, the myth survives, and the public gets to feel disappointed instead of implicated.
That cycle is not democratic self-correction.
It is imperial emotional management."