Fine, everybody is Nazis and everybody is garbage.

Please, for the love of god, can we be done with this election?

As an occasional writer of political things, I’ve spent the past few weeks watching appearances of both candidates on an (odd) assortment of TV, radio, and podcasts. I’m pretty sure it has sucked the last of my will to live away. My brain is officially mush, and at this point, I welcome an invasion of our alien overlords. Kodos or Kang, I don’t care, I’ll take either. Both would be superior to the choices (between the two major parties) we are presented with in this election. I am well aware this is not a particularly new thought. It’s a lament commonly heard around election time, especially since 2016. It’s certainly how I felt in 2016, and then again in 2020. This election season has brought me to levels of despair though.

Of course, my way of dealing with this choice is not a very popular one. I reject them both, and vote third party. I’ve been told (repeatedly) that my vote for a third party is actually a vote for Trump by Harris boosters and a vote for Harris by Maga folks. I figure if I’m making both groups unhappy, then I’m doing something right. Neither campaign has done much of anything to win my vote. Telling me that the other team is Nazis, communists, or that they hate the country and we’ll never have another election if they win, is not trying to win my vote, it’s trying to talk me out of voting for the other candidate. The erosion of civil liberties is my number one issue. Both camps have shown little to no interest in civil liberties, except to tell me the other team is worse. You can’t tell me you’re pro-free speech and then propose a law against flag burning. I think the current administration’s views on free speech are self-evident (they don’t like it). None of that is what has made this election so uniquely unbearable to me.

I think Kang has better messaging personally.

This may be the most vapid election of my lifetime. Harris can talk for hours without saying anything, and Trump can talk for hours and say everything no matter how contradictory. Both have “policy plans” kinda. Neither has given any real details on their foreign policy. With potential hot wars with nuclear powers, I’d like to hear something deeper than “We’ll support our allies” or “I’ll end the wars”. It’s like foreign policy for middle-schoolers. I fully understand that most folks don’t vote on deep policy issues, but that doesn’t mean they’re not important. Policy is dry and boring, and often hard to understand. It’s still ultimately the best way for a candidate to convey their worldview and governing strategy.

Harris’s plan purports to focus more on working-class folks, but that’s suspect at best. Giving away money for a down payment on a house and money to start a business sounds great, if you ignore what excessive government spending did to inflation in the last four years. The whole Dem party seems to believe it’s 2008-2009 when our massive injection of money into the system didn’t cause runaway inflation. . There are a lot of reasons for that (MMT has rotted a lot of brains), but the spending in 2020-2021 had a very different effect, as anybody who buys groceries knows. Not to mention asking cashiers and plumbers to pay off the student loans of a gender studies major is so deeply, deeply insulting to so many. Trump’s plan seems to be largely the same Republican ideas I’ve been hearing for thirty years, tax cuts that will pay for themselves. This never happens, as you can see from the massive increase in the national debt during Trump’s first four years in office. It’s “trickle-down” economics rebranded. Deregulation can certainly be a good thing, depending on the regulations that are eliminated. A lot, if not most, regulations that will impact regular folks are local or state regulations though.

So we have two candidates with very little appeal and very little substance. At this point, my hope is for a landslide in either direction, just so the damn thing will be done and over with as soon as possible. I know there is practically zero chance of that happening, but I can hope. I also hope the losing side will accept they lost and move on (and shut the fuck up about it). 2016 and 2020 don’t leave me with much hope for that either. I fear the next four years will either be Russia-gate redux or the big steal 2.0. The citizens of this country deserve more than empty, halfcocked, lip service and name-calling. We won’t get it without demanding it though, and that requires either sitting out or voting your conscience even if that means a third party. I know that partisans will read that and freak out about the other side winning. All I can say is this, if we survived eight years of W, we can survive four years of either one of these terrible choices. I know we can because the country didn’t end in 2017 or 2021. Although I do have a sneaking suspicion that the Mayans were right and the world ended in 2012. Everything since has been some sort of shared purgatory. I don’t think I’m right, but I can dream.