On November 3, the American election will offer the world a sad spectacle that could last a long time.

After the day of the vote, the winner may not yet be decided. The risk of a Supreme Court battle, as was the case in 2000 (Bush vs. Gore), is great, and the mail-in ballot promises to complicate matters. These elements of pathetic discord, added to the permanent backstage work of senators and representatives – where dirty tricks rain down and repeat themselves (between democrats and republicans), expose the deep evil of the bipartisan system, always very ideologically oriented in the strategies that oppose them. The politics is highly caricatured, obscene and crude. This typically American crisis and its deleterious drifts also open a window on the democratic backsliding that can be observed almost everywhere else in the West.

American elections: a threatening context

The 2020 election is challenging all the rusty and distended mechanisms of a democratic system that is being abused and is on the verge of breaking down. As such, the election between Biden and Trump – two notorious senilities each with a propensity for narcissistic one-upmanship and lying – becomes in itself a kind of advance measure of the very health of our global democracy, and indirectly, of our faltering financial and economic institutions, far beyond the US.

The prospects for American voters are quite limited and hopeless, implemented by a multitude of pretenses, carried by the fervor of the whole camp, of which the Republicans are certainly the most hysterical and the least rational.

In this evanescent context where the manure invades the barn, the ambient cynicism increases to become a threat. The American people are divided and hate each other.

Everywhere, we witness violent outbursts and the destruction of public property. The spirits of each group are galvanized by the fire of injustice and inaction, and carried like a crescendo of desolation to a new radicalism of opposition between the so-called right-wing and liberal factions. The citizen revolt and destruction are like a signal or a response, at least, a shrill cry that calls for a collective solution before the tear.

The social crisis is multifaceted: endemic racism is still coming back to haunt America – racism that has never been curbed since the Civil War of 1861-1865 and the Jim Crow laws – all these murders committed by policemen on duty, all this daily violence, this poverty and injustice in the cities and the countryside, the right to education and health care that more than 80 million people claim, add up and the rosary is endless…

We cannot omit the climate and environmental issues, denied to the bone by this sectarian administration, subservient to the ambient corporatism. The situation is then unparalleled. The tragedy is that the Democrats will only superficially distance themselves from Republican policies if elected. Biden and Harris are like Laurel and Hardy: two more clowns representing a range of special interests that are not connected to the needs of the people as a whole. American politics has become distorted over time: no party today stands up for the poor or the middle class, except during campaigns, to ensure their vote.

On November 3, 2020, get your hot popcorn ready, crack open a cold beer… And live the drama live in the thick desolation of the present.