written in the fucking 1970s
Was thinking about it today and I think this might be the worst election ever. The jokes about 100% Hitler versus 99% Hitler are so spot on. Never in my life have I seen two candidates with literally nothing to offer the working class except death and misery.
Has it always been like this, and each generation people like us notice it and others don't, or is this truly unprecedented?
obama's rhetoric was genuinely much more progressive than any of his policies. joe biden's 2020 rhetoric was also more progressive than his policies. joe biden's 2024 rhetoric is uniquely antiprogressive. they've just entirely given up on the idea that someone would actually campaign on a platform.
I remember when Biden won in 2020 a bunch of his sycophant politicos were essentially saying out loud that the lesson they had learned from 2016-2020 was that they can simply invent reality. They almost used those words. They looked at polling data about peoples perceptions of the economy before and after the 2016 elections, where people gave partisan answers (like republican affiliated people saying the economy was terrible and then the weeks after trumps inauguration they said that it was doing great-- but nothing had really changed) they saw that, and the capitulation of any Democratic Party left-wing (in both 2016 and 2020) and got completely absorbed in a sort of Hegelian idealism where they are able to dictate reality to whoever identifies with the democrats (or not with the republicans).
In a way, they were not wrong about how things had operated during the "end of history", more or less, except for the fact that there are moments where 1) material conditions can deteriorate and the moment the US electorate is subject to worsening conditions their narrative can fail 2) alternative media, like what can proliferate on social media, can expose the complete disconnect between words and actions and move consciousness.
You can see the hubris, when turbo-libs talk about how the real problem is people "not understanding" or "not knowing" all of Biden's "many accomplishments" or that these simple rubes don't know that the economy is actually doing "great." They have an incredibly powerful ability to control the way reality is presented for a ton of people, and that success was even on full display during the beginning of the SMO/Russia entering the Donbas & Ukraine. For a few weeks everyone had fucking Ukrainian flags out and everyone on tv was talking about Ukraine as a bastion of freedom and democracy, without knowing a fucking thing about Ukraine. I think back to 1999 to 2012 and I think a lot of the political class believed what they were saying about this policy or that policy. Because the window of debate was so narrow nearly at all times and nothing had a sense of urgency. Now they simply rage when the public adopts a belief that falls outside of what they are trying to construct. It was partly what they were seething about with the Facebook/russia-gate/fake news conspiracies that forced the tech bourgeoisie to adopt a more hard line on "acceptable" content and deployed state-sanctioned "debunkers" ... this is also was what paved the way to banning TikTok-- it wouldn't have been possible if the ruling class hadn't identified this as their primary challenge.
If you want a dang cheeto in the white house so bad, then why don't you
for PUTLER, sweaty? 
It swings back and forth a bit but not by much. Llituro is correct though that Biden is uniquely bad in terms of democratic candidates. We are just witnessing contradictions sharpening.
It's absolutely the worst election, by virtue of the fact that it's between the same two guys as the last election. I can't think of a more apt metaphor for a nation in decline than having the last two presidents duke it out again, despite the fact that everything got significantly worse during their terms. And there's the fact that they were already the two oldest presidential candidates in US history last time, so now they've broken their own record by 4 years.
