The US Election Doesn't Matter

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[...]
Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven't come.
 And some of our men just in from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.

Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
 Those people were a kind of solution.

                 C. P. Cavafy, Nov. 1898

- - -

The barbarians are already here.

Trump wins. It is challenged in the courts. There are riots. It doesn’t matter.

Or, Harris wins. It is challenged in the courts. There are riots. It doesn’t matter.

Neither result will save the USA from failing.

Citizens of the United States cannot secure their futures. The US state, in the 'deep' sense that some people wave to abstractly, secures a future for its own. Its own people do not include the average family, child, or young adult. People in the US and its client states are sown with debt and reaped for their rent and taxes. Their savings go into stocks or mortgages and their pay comes in ever-inflating currency. The US and its clients are a company town, and we are all company workers. The state becomes a fief and work becomes serfdom.

Look at the MAGA slogans: Kennedy’s ‘Make America Healthy Again’. Musk’s ‘Make America Efficient Again’?! Trump’s party may have recognized that ‘America’ is failing, but they won’t change it. They have drunk the (red-white-and-blue) Kool-Aid of “Get out and vote!”. It won’t matter. Not to the people that want change.

Look at the Harris camp. By refusing to campaign on policy (or even personality), she has inadvertently let slip the truth: Presidential races don’t matter. No choice at the US election will have meaningful impact on people’s lives. The event itself will have an impact – and a pretty strong one if it isn’t just rioting – but not the nominee that ends up ‘winning’ this popularity contest.

The mania around this election, and the previous two, is projection. We have seen three “This-is-the-most-important-election-of-our-lives” contests in as many election cycles. Sure, the heat might have built up a bit more, but the actual stakes, the actual consequences of the result, don't match the fervor. Voters want their choice to matter. Nominees want their election to matter. Both parties can detect that it doesn’t. “Maybe if I really, REALLY, want it!” They silently bounce their anxieties back and forth between each other and build up a cloud of frustration and rage. It matters to them. They want it to matter, and they might make it matter. Expect violence.

The barbarians have been inside the gates for some time.

The US is not run by a president. It is run by Congress. If the electorate voted-in a President who was not of the two parties, that person would have no meaningful power to govern. The once-executive is a creature of the once-legislative and now administrative branch. The President is the pet of Congress. Congress administers the US state and Congress is captured. The re-election rate is 95% for the House of Representatives and 90% for the Senate. It’s been the same Congress for decades. When was the last time the President mattered? Look past the media, what did the executive actually change about the US in the last three administrations?

Politics is medicine on a larger scale. A state is always tempted towards power. Leviathan always gorges. The political process is a tool for healing, maintaining, or ‘renewing’ the state when required and where it’s needed. If the political process does not allow for these functions, then it is a captured state. Couple that with a religion-less society, and nothing can be built to replace the captured state. We don’t build cathedrals or communities. We don’t build guilds or factories. We build stadiums and Amazon Fulfilment Centers - the coliseum and the grain dole.

We are waiting for the barbarians to do with us what they will.

Post-election, expect popular frustration. Expect violence. The barbarians are here, and elections won’t kick them out.

Politics is not waiting for the barbarians to do it for you. Learn to and prepare to build once, like the poem said, “there are no barbarians any longer”.

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