It increasingly appears the voters have bought the USA four more years to get things straight before the centrifugal forces begin to dismantle the societal structures:
Blue Americans cannot bear thought of four more years of Trump, his desecration of the values that made America a beacon to the world, his bullying and lies, his undermining of the norms and institutions that make America work, his contempt for European allies, and his kowtowing to foreign dictators. They fear that Trump will use false claims of election fraud and the post-election social unrest to engineer a military coup, in which he would set himself up as dictator, and abolish free press and American democracy.
Red Americans fear a Biden administration that will open borders to massive immigration, encourage looting and property destruction by BLM and antifa rioters, take away their guns, increase their taxes, and end the oil and gas industry in America. Many see Biden as the senile figurehead for the global cabal of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and child-sex predators that include prominent Democrats, Hollywood elites, and deep state allies, whose aim is to establish an unelected “liberal dictatorship” that would abolish freedom of speech and American democracy.
Each side sees the world in Manichean terms and increasingly endorses violence as the necessary means to prevent the other side from staying in, or coming to power. As a result, we are in an extremely fragile state, which in technical terms is known as the revolutionary situation.
What will happen on November 3? One possibility is that one side wins by a landslide and the other accepts it. This is what the generals fervently hope for. This would avoid a civil war, at least for a time. The problem is that neither side has shown any willingness or understanding to solve the structural problems that have brought about the current revolutionary situation. And it takes years to reverse the negative structural-demographic trends, even once the necessary reforms are implemented. So we simply kick the problem forward to 2024.
But Peter Turchin is right. A Trumpslide doesn’t solve anything, it simply gives Americans a little more time to get serious about addressing the sickness at the heart of the US empire before it is too late.
Of course, it could be worse. It could be a LOT worse. This dementia-addled guy might have won.
Joe Biden introduces his granddaughter by saying, “This is my son, Beau Biden, who a lot of you helped elect to the Senate in Delaware. This is…this is my granddaughter, Natalie. No wait, no wait. We got the wrong one.”
Beau Biden died in 2015. He never even ran for the Senate.