There’s a whole class of “consultants” who work in Washington who are some of the most deluded, corrupt, and dishonest people you could ever want to meet. It is almost impossible to succeed in politics without making a Faustian bargain with them, even if you started out good (which, mostly, you didn’t), and once you do, forever will they control your destiny. They will decide that particular people are allowed to run. They will swing massive amounts of money and (more crucially) media attention in favor of the corporate candidates and away from the popular candidates.

They are some of the most dislikable people you can imagine. They’re all fake, like a Ken doll or a church mom, and they don’t care if you know it. And their priorities are wildly out of step with anything that will produce progress for America. They run the RNC and the DNC, and by the time decisions make it down to the level of the American people getting to pick one of the options, it’s mostly a disheartening array of bullshit that no one really has any stomach for selecting any one of, which is only further depressive of any interest by any large segment of the population in making any of that better.

Sometimes fuckups happen. Bernie was almost a massive fuckup, but they were able to kneecap him in time. Biden was actually pretty good for the working class, within the parameters of what they find to be acceptable, but I think he is 100% unable to, for example, take meaningful action against Israel, or they would throttle him in the night (figuratively speaking), and he would never recover, and Trump would win.

None of this is to say that voting doesn’t matter. Voting for Biden in this particular election will be necessary if you don’t want the world to end, chiefly because of how horrifyingly worse than even the uninspiring norm Trump is. (Trump was a fuckup, too, by the way; they didn’t want him but they were faced with a fairly authentic popular movement that just hates all politicians with a fiery passion and wants to throw them all in the river and was able to identify that he wasn’t one, and that was enough.)

But the overall system is so inbred and corrupt that people with genuinely new ideas are commonly ejected from the system, as a matter of course, before they can gain traction that might threaten anybody’s paycheck. And so, you get two old, old men who both have significant drawbacks (though not of the same kind or degree), competing to see which one can run the most powerful country in the world. It’s like if 1960s NASA had all the same engineering, all the same genius and money and manpower, except, the president’s idiot nephew was in charge of picking astronauts, and there were only like 10 random people in the world that were willing to play baseball with him that he liked, so they had to just go with a couple guys out of that lot that were acceptable to that guy for some fuckin reason and hope it went okay.

Ask me if I am bitter about it