Look where the 'lesser evil' got us

Like a kind of Olympics of shit, the US presidential election has come around again.

A lot has been written already about how the genocide is affecting the US election, much of it by people who believe that the main significance of the eradication of a society is how it plays in the swing states. Others are doing their best to pretend the genocide doesn’t exist so they can keep indulging the Disney Adult-style wish fulfilment that an American election provides.

I used to follow American politics obsessively. Events have cured me of this. My no longer being the kind of person who won't shut up about the fucking New Hampshire primary is proof that all of us are capable of growth.

Like every other journalist at the time, I confidently predicted back in 2015 that Donald Trump would crash out of the Republican primary. More than a year later I watched a room filled with the worst people you can imagine slowly realise they had backed a winner. 

I thought the world was ending, and that we were at the beginning of a new and frightening era. Over time I was surprised at how little changed; how closely the 'new' reality resembled the old one.

I felt this again in 2020, when the Democrats won back the presidency. The 'normalcy' that Democrats and their domestic fandom crowed about having restored seemed indistinguishable from what had come before.