And yet not a single vote was cast by any citizen for any candidate this year. The first vote won't be cast until next month. For this reason alone, 2016 will be worse than 2015 because the craziness won't end until November of next year. Rampant political insanity will crowd out every other story, including those ongoing statistical measures of America's decline.

It is not hard to find signs of America's decline , but grim statistics only tell part of the story. The deeper problem is that the United States is, psychologically speaking, a basket case. This is most evident in the presidential political circus which dominated the news during the latter half of 2015.

Psychologically, the prolonged political craziness strikes me as a gigantic case of over-compensation.

The Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler (1870-1937) found that if a person feels inferior, or weak, he is likely to try to compensate to hide the weakness, by doing something else really well. According to Adler, inferiority is a feeling that stems from the childhood. Since infants are small, incomplete, and weak, they feel inferior and powerless. To compensate for this deficiency, they set a fictional goal that is big, complete and strong. Thus, a person’s final goal reduces the pain of inferiority feelings and directs that person towards either superiority or success. People may in such cases not even be aware that they are compensating...

We are reasoning by analogy here. Simply substitute "America" for Adler's "person" and things become clear. Specifically, what is over-compensation?

We may differentiate between positive and negative compensation. Negative compensation either manifests itself as over-compensation, or as under-compensation. Overcompensation happens when a person feels inferior and will go out of his way to feel superior. This leads to the person seeking power, dominance and increased self-esteem. This happens when a person has felt physically or socially inferior all of his life, and for example becomes overly eager to become a sport champion, or feel the urge to gain power over other people...

America over-compensates for it's unacknowledged (unconscious) feelings of inferiority (see all those statistical signs of decline). In what we might call our collective (shared) unconscious, Americans "know" that the nation is not what it used to be, a decline which accelerated after 2008.

What is America's big fictional goal? How does the over-compensation work itself out?

Straightforwardly, the United States over-compensates by staging the biggest presidential political/media circus in the history of human civilization. Mostly this circus is promoted by America's elites, those who harbor the most intense unconscious feelings of inferiority. Most ordinary people, the hoi polloi, don't have to be reminded of their increasingly inferior position because they live it every day.

But elites need to act out this astonishing circus so they can pretend that something important is at stake, so they can pretend that America democracy works, god-damn it, and don't you see this miracle all around you? And thus by placing inordinate importance on this 2-year bamboozle, they compensate for the fact that America is not only inferior compared to other nations and its own storied past, but also for the troubling fact that our deeply entrenched corruption is getting worse all the time.

And thus we understand that as America gets more and more corrupt and dysfunctional, more and more importance must be placed on the political process which epitomizes that corruption. The less there is at stake for ordinary American citizens, the more our corrupt and therefore meaningless political process clamors for their attention. In fact, ordinary Americans will continue to be undermined by the political system, both during the election and after it.

It's all a massive "lie" in this sense, but its a "lie" elite Americans must tell themselves over and over. For two years! Thus we get self-delusion on a massive scale. America's elites can never confront the nation's increasing inferiority directly. America's senescence must remain buried in the unconscious. Instead, they will remind us every day all day long that the Greatest and Most Important Show on Earth is happening right here in the United States.

Do you see now? Our democracy works! And if you don't think it works, we're going to beat you over the head every day until you either become a believer or you sustain irreversible brain damage.

If you understand those last few paragraphs, the 2-year political circus in the United States makes total sense. Psychologically, all this meaningless noise is merely a greatly exaggerated expression of a basic (and primitive) defense mechanism. In Flatland terms, there is an astonishing amount of "bad news" filtering going on here in the United States.

And of course America's elites, the ones who are doing well, have every reason to maintain a corrupt status quo, as I have discussed many times before. This has the effect of reinforcing the basic over-compensation.

So, if 2015 sucked, and it did, 2016 will be much, much worse.