After securing the Republican Party nomination early and thus making Super Tuesday irrelevant, Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and President Joe Biden will meet for the second time in a series of televised debates before the 2024 Presidential Election. Speaker Ryan hopes kickstart lagging American manufacturing with his "Stepping Forward" program; which involves government incentive payments for businesses to take on apprentices and trainees. President Biden is hoping to counter "Stepping Forward" with his own headline set of policies which include the National Health Agency; which will become the new universal payer for healthcare services, funded by a 1.5% levy on incomes.
Or rather... That should have been the time line.
I don't know where in 2014 or 2015 the switch was flipped but the last decade or so has definitely been the outworking of a series of bugs in the programming. If we are living in a computer simulation, or inside the matrix, or are all just figments of the imagination of someone in a drug-induced fever coma dream, then it was about a decade ago when we switched from a tragic yet semi-logical timeline to a really really stupid one.
Had everything stayed on the tragic yet semi-logical timeline, then Hilary Clinton would have been President from 2017-2021; and then still been so unpopular within the Democrat Party that she would have still been replaced by Joe Biden in the 2020 Election, and the above photo for the 2024 Election would have happened. There is no way no how that we would have ever gotten the good timeline in which Bernie Sanders became President and embarked upon an actual shift of American politics to the left and a new wave of Teddy Roosevelt style of reforms.
No.
Instead we got the stupid timeline; which has involved a collapse of any kind of sensible leadership in rightist parties across the Anglosphere (which kicked off with the Year Of The Howling Moron), the rise of actual far-rightist parties across Europe, and the emboldenment of functional fascists such as Putin and Netanyahu; who have demonstrated as much by actively pursuing war while the world kind of begrudgingly approves.
Meanwhile, as the colour of politics got more stupid, the pandemic was an excuse to accelerate the use of market power by capital, to the point where the breaking points of society are starting to be exposed. Politically, the actual economic left has been seen off by the economic right; so that only leaves the field of play for the Libertarian South to fight the Authoritarian North. Since they both live on the economic right (because let's be perfectly honest, so much of all of the political -isms of the twenty-first century have all been rightist), then all we get is a pointless culture war where the names of things are yelled at each other. Almost the entire of the battleground of the culture war, is little more than token exchange. Nobody seems to actually care about solving the big problems of society; which have been the result of 40 years of active policies.
As we look forward to the actual series of televised debates before the 2024 Presidential Election, all I can do is find myself asking the question 'why?' and 'what?'. Why are they happened and what is the actual point. One candidate has repeatedly proven that he does not and will not construct any argument whatsoever and the other one is really just a caretaker until this whole thing blows over. At this point in time, nobody will be actually listening to the substance of what they will say because there is no real substance to be found. This means that the 2024 Presidential Election will purely be lost and won on the basis of which set of vibes happens to be vibrating louder in the general token exchange of the culture war.
It isn't difficult to see how we arrived at this point. Basically what happened at the end of the 1970s was that a series of shocks in the price of oil, made business realise that they actually had more power than they thought they did. If we can assume that the Trent Gloriseus was an anomaly, then capital decided to reassert itself with the election cycles from 1976 onwards. In Australia which was used as a test case, a Prime Minister was fired; then in the UK and the US, capital worked out that it could poison people's opinions forever by abandoning truth and purely shifting to a perpetual propaganda tone. Thatcher and Reagan who both essentially created a minor echo boom by selling off everything, did their job and both Alzheimered their way into the sunset; completely free of consequence. Capital won the economic war firstly in the west and then on the dismal side of the Iron Curtain, because as it turns out, we can't actually supply all the wants of capital if they already own everything. What's happening now in the west, is the same process as capital is running out of things to conquer.
If we look back on the tragic yet semi-logical timeline, then at this point in time we would have had politicians with actual substance. Malcolm Turnbull would have remained as Prime Minister until 2022 and Penny Wong would be Prime Minister from the Senate now. Britain would have voted for a Corbyn Labor Government in 2019; which would have actually rebuilt the NHS and there wouldn't be this omnishambles which exists now. Ryan would have remained as Speaker of the House and because the Republican Party wouldn't have pivoted to this insane culture war point it would actually putting forward genuine policies.
Paul Ryan as the most sensible and conciliatory politician of the generation, would have actually made deals and bargains through congressional process to do that really bizarre concept now of... wait for it... here's the punchline... getting stuff done.
Instead, on this timeline, the stupid timeline, where the only things that politicians can argue about are flags and pronouns and songs and who is offended, instead of the fact that there is genuine knavery with people being killed across the world and people who don't really have any kind of long term security about where they will call home, all the while blaming in on foreigners and brown people and people who look different, then of course nothing actually gets done. Rinse. Repeat. Wallow. Yell.
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