Canadian here, watching the American election shitshow like everyone else.
A few remarks:
Many aspects of the US political system strike me as evidence of a failed democracy, yet they are not only accepted as normal in the US but offered as something of a model to the rest of the world. Like the idea of being registered for one party, or those waiting lines at polls, or those voting machines that you're always worried might get hacked but will never replace with old-fashioned paper ballots, or this idea that the more people in more positions you may vote for, the more democracy you're getting, or the obvious perversion of the democratic process by money, or the overt partisanship of the judiciary.
Of particular interest to this conversation is this idea that you can meaningfully vote for a third party in the US, or that doing so means that your hands are clean because you didn't vote for Trump directly. Voting for a third party is certainly a possibility in Canada, where third parties are represented in parliament and can affect the balance of power; but in the US it should be understood by everyone at this point that a word that is not for the Democrats is a vote for the Republicans, and if you live in a safe state where your vote won't affect anything, still urge people to vote for the Democrats in case they come from a state where that may make the difference.
Were I American, I would vote for the Democrats. But I can't avoid thinking about how inept and complacent they are, incapable of learning the slightest lesson of their defeats and incapable of taking advantage of the rare situations where they happen to win. (An old saying of mine is that the Democrats are incapable of winning an election without the Republicans losing it first.) Why is it, for instance, that they are incapable of producing ads with an impact even approaching what the Lincoln Project is doing? Why is it that their big-tent approach inevitably turns into a three-ring circus? Why is it that they waste every opportunity to pass serious reform when they do hold power, and when you look into things, you find that they spend the bulk of their time chasing *their own members*?
Canadian parties maintain rigid voting lines on all bills of importance. I can't imagine someone like Joe Manchin lasting very long before being booted out of his party's caucus up here.
The first test of any Biden administration will come very early: whether it decides to expand the Supreme Court. Since by now the whole McConnell hypocrisy on judicial appointments in an election year is so obvious that it has largely gone without saying in recent weeks, if Biden doesn't expand the Supreme Court, anything else he passes will be struck down eventually using the little-known Deus Vult clause of the Constitution, so we'll know beforehand that, if he doesn't address the problem of the Supreme Court first, the rest of his administration is all a waste of time anyway, even if the Democrats won't realize it until the challenges make their way through the legal system.
The problem with the Democrats is that they still believe in political institutions and in American Exceptionalism, that they believe Trump was an anomaly caused by an illegitimate election that happened because of Russia or whatever, rather than the inevitable consequence of decades of American politics.
You may have no alternative but to use Tea-Party tactics against the Democrats, purge the party from the inside, throw out the deadwood, the bipartisanship aficionados and the compromisers, beginning with the deadly duo of Schumer and Pelosi, who should never have been entrusted with leadership of their respective house caucuses. I saw there were some embryonic efforts to that effect in 2016 and 2018, like the attempt to primary Pelosi, but they were rather limited from what I saw, which may account for why, apart from a few select individuals like AOC, they for the most part went nowhere. In comparison, 2022 and 2024 should see something relentless and on a large scale. It will be more difficult if Biden wins, because then the Democrats will be flattered by their belief in their own competence, whereas if he loses the gloves are off. You should definitely support Biden because Trump is worse for every single aspect of a left agenda (not to mention the lunacy and authoritarianism of his adminstration), but you should prepare yourselves for every eventuality, to be ready regardless of how it goes tomorrow.
