Americans, desperate for change, delude selves into thinking vote matters

By Daniel Patrick Welch

Superficially the candidates seem to be very different certainly in terms of personality. You know, Trump is boorish, he's unrefined, he's loud, he's not the kind of guy you want to come to your backyard cookout. He's full of himself.

Biden is smoother. He's that Good Old Boy, everyone's uncle or at least these are the personality traits that they try to project. But that in itself shows the barrenness of the whole process. There's always a Seinfeld line for everything--and these people ‘sure have built themselves up into something!’ They are touting this as the greatest election, the most important election in the history of history. I just look at it and say, are these people serious?

I mean, everybody knows, or the rest of the world knows that policies don't change but presidents do. That's how the rational world sees what's going on. But there are factions, you know, and there really is something happening. I mean there are a quite a large number of people whose hatred for Trump is so visceral that they'll even vote for Biden, and the hatred is not, is for Trump the man but also at what they pretend he has taken from them - this notion that there is a real America that's different than what Trump represents, and they want it back. They want the smoothness. They want a sense of dignity, a sense of purpose, and respectability. The trouble is that it is a lot of pretending.

Trump is the most perfect distillation of what this country represents that any candidate has ever shown. It's like he's a caricature of the American, the Ugly American, except that other presidents have started even more wars and dropped even more bombs.

On the other side, you have an equal or well, even I think deeper, much deeper anger. Anger at what Trump pretends to represent--that is the people's deep-seated, fear, anxiety about the future, about the disappearance of manufacturing, the crushing of unions, the neoliberal austerity agenda, elites lying to them, corporations chipping away at their humanity, not getting government to listen, not feeling like they're being heard. And for a variety of reasons Trump has manipulated this into a personality mind storm that is quite impressive.

He gives a rally (and they talk about how this is insane, people say oh how can he do that, these are super spreader events), but you can't ignore the fact that he draws like 50,000 people in Butler County, Pennsylvania, which has a total population of only just over 180,000. I mean, it is a phenomenon and it can't be ignored.

Well, we'll have to see whether that is enough to counter the enormous weight of shaming that went on with the democrats and their foisting Biden on the rest of us. It's not the most important election in the history of history. It's ridiculous, and it makes me really angry. When I hear it I just want to shut off the TV, the conversation. Just withdraw because it's such ado about nothing.

'You're fired' or 'Biden wins stolen election'

If Biden should pull out a stunning victory I’m sure the liberal media will lead with ‘You’re Fired’. If it should go to Trump they’ll say, “Chaos Reigns!”.

Well, we can compromise and say, you know, greatest in the history of mammals, right? The dinosaurs did okay. So we'll leave them out of it. I don't know. I can only make jokes about it because I just don't know how else to react. Another post that I made was that this is what they call Ground Zero Hour.

It's when the rest of the world gets to find out who will be dropping the bombs the next time because that's really what it means to millions of people around the world. Also, be careful, your vote is important. If you vote for the wrong guy US policy could fall into the hands of warmongers. That's a joke because it's like a trick question.

There is not going to be any of that difference. No matter what people choose they're deluding themselves. And this always happens. That's the thing. It's not a special election. This always happens every four years, people convince themselves that this time it will make a difference.

And there's like a mass hysteria even if the famous Princeton study proved that we're an oligarchy, not a democracy, that people have very, very little power to change the rules that govern them and that power is given mostly or asserted mostly by the elites. The trouble is that this is also the way long term change goes but Democrats have to be cautious or at least progressives who think that getting rid of Trump is going to solve some big issues. It's not.

Ultimately it will be the democrats who strike the Grand Bargain that the DLC has been talking about for decades. Their privatizing or partial privatizing of Social Security, revamping of the entitlement system, and the prosecution of an austerity agenda, they already have done that. They are the ones who have ushered in austerity most effectively. And, that's how the parties do each other’s dirty work. And the change, continues. Well, it continues to not happen.

Democrats initiated the end of welfare, the biggest nail in the coffin of welfare under Clinton which he thought was necessary to preserve the Democrat white votes. I don't know exactly how to encapsulate it. They want everyone to forget all the things that have happened before, all the wars that the regime initiated under Obama. The travesty that was the Democratic primary process where Biden magically gets gifted this spot. It's not democracy and, in a sense, it's not real but it's all we're talking about today, and it's all we're supposed to care about.

And when push comes to shove tomorrow or whenever we decide--if it's that close and we might not know for a few days--but I think it will shake out one way or the other. The interesting thing is that a sway of a few million or a few points could cause the impression of quite a wide change. You could have the Senate upset, we could have Texas or Georgia flipped blue for the first time in ages and on the other side, you can have the republicans win Pennsylvania and carry the rust belt, the old union manufacturing base that had been blue for generations.

Then what? You wake up and you go to work. And your pay is still not quite enough to cover the bills. And you still have people being bombed by Democrat ordered planes instead of Republican ordered planes. You have police beating Black men in the street and doing it with impunity in Democrat-led cities instead of Republican-led cities and on and on and on.

The system is resilient and resistant to this kind of change. And it's not going to be fixed by this election, no matter how they scream and shout about how important it is.

The indispensable nation and its nonexistent democracy!

“There is only one story in this whole election cycle, and that is stopping [Bernie] Sanders,” writes Daniel Patrick Welch.

Daniel Patrick Welch is a writer of political commentary and analysis. Also a singer and songwriter, he lives and writes in Salem, Massachusetts with his wife. Together they run The Greenhouse School. He has traveled widely, speaks five languages and studied Russian History and Literature at Harvard University. Welch has also appeared as a guest on several TV and radio channels to speak on topics of foreign affairs and political analysis--around his day job. He can be available for interview requests as time and scheduling permit. Despite the price of being outspoken against US foreign policy and military adventurism -- which can be steep in today's circumstances -- he believes firmly as did Rosa Luxemburg that "It will always be the most revolutionary act to tell the truth out loud."

Welch wrote this article for Press TV website.

Press TV’s website can also be accessed at the following alternate addresses:

www.presstv.co.uk