Technically there is less than a month until Election Season ends, but that’s a lie. It will stretch beyond November 5 because there is no longer a firm winner, only contestation and violence and profiteering, swirling like storm water in a sewer.
We have been in Election Season for a decade. The season has no predictable pattern other than its steady series of disasters. It is like climate change, with each catastrophe first denied and then weaponized. We know the roots of the crises, but no one is held accountable. We know how to mitigate the damage, but the powerful insist it is ordinary people’s fault. “You should have voted the hurricane out,” they scold. “It’s your job to evacuate before fascism arrives!” Maybe I got that backwards. It’s hard to keep messaging straight in Election Season, when authority holds no sincerity and time loses all meaning. There are no sweet summers or crisp autumns or cool winters or lush springs in Election Season. There is only the memory of a bygone era when things changed, instead of dragging on and on. Once there were four seasons and now there is one: climate chaos. Once there were rotating four-year presidencies and now there is one endless campaign, a pale horse race whose rider is Death, and Hell follows him. Hell follows you too, on social media, and demands you follow Hell back. Hell follows your phone and your car and your right to privacy and asks you for a donation.
Make it end, already!
The 2024 campaign discourse was a rerun in which pundits gave the same warnings about Trump’s autocratic aims that I gave in 2016 but ignored that he has since held office and carried many of them out, including sedition, yet was unpunished and allowed to run for president again. That is the real story of the 2024 election: sanctioned illegality. Impunity countenanced by all sides. No one in power takes the sovereignty of the US seriously and now they don’t even bother pretending.
