Election fever season seems to be heating up to a level unprecedented in recent cycles and the hype is getting pretty thick relative to the significance of the election.

Not that you asked for my opinion, but, this is probably the least important election of my lifetime. That is not to say that other events are not consequential, we live in precarious times with the sands of change shifting under our feet. The thing is, it's quite unlikely that this election will make any difference in addressing the urgent situations that humankind is facing.

We have gotten to the point in the cycle where we can say that (excluding the occurance of a miracle) the winner of the election will either be an unhinged, deeply corrupt, war-mongering, McCarthyite, racist, austerity and globalization-promoting, fracking queen - or it will be an unhinged, austerity-promoting, tax-chopping, racist, ego-driven, narcissistic, climate-change-denying, loose cannon, con-man.

In other words, the Democrat or the Republican will probably win.

But the good news is that the 1%'s game is more transparent than ever:

For much of the last century the illusion of social progress sold through the New Deal, the Great Society and more recently through capitalist enterprise ‘freed’ from the bind of social accountability, if not exactly from the need for regular and robust public support, served to hold at bay the perpetual tomorrow of lives lived for the theorized greater good of accumulated self-interest. ... Being three or more decades in the making, the current political season was never about the candidates except inasmuch as they embody the grotesquely disfigured and depraved condition of the body politic. The ‘consumer choice’ politics of Democrat versus Republican, Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump, poses the greater-evilism of an ossified political class against the facts of its own creation now in dire need of resolution— wars to end wars, environmental crisis to end environmental crises, economic predation to end economic predation and manufactured social misery to end social misery.

The liberals and progressives in the managerial class who support the status quo and are acting as enforcers to elect Hillary Clinton are but one recession away from being tossed overboard by those they serve within the existing economic order. The premise that the ruling class will always need dedicated servants grants coherent logic and aggregated self-interest that history has disproven time and again. A crude metaphor would be the unintended consequences of capitalist production now aggregating to environmental crisis. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are both such conspicuously corrupt tools of an intellectually and spiritually bankrupt social order that granting tactical brilliance to their ascendance, or even pragmatism given the point in history and available choices, seems wildly generous. For those looking for a political moment, one is on the way.

This election cycle more than previous ones, the 1% parties have shown their hand rigging the primaries behind the scenes to deliver us the "choices" for the November election.

It is fairly obvious that elections as a means of making positive change for the US is foreclosed as a means for the people.

Even the sainted Bernie Sanders says so, as David Dayen notes in a recent essay about the launch of "Our Revolution" :

When Bernie Sanders stepped to the stage on Wednesday to announce the launching of “Our Revolution,” a political organization dedicated to keeping the momentum of his presidential campaign going by supporting candidates at all levels of government, he inadvertently admitted that it wouldn’t do much good. “Real change never ever takes place from the top on down. It’s not some guy signing a bill,” Sanders said at the live-streamed launch event. “It always takes place from the bottom up when millions of people come together and demand fundamental change in the country.” ...

The truth is that what boosted the Sanders campaign from irrelevance to prominence did come from the bottom up—not just from $27 donations, but from millions of moments of personal expression, using tools as old as leaflets and as new as Facebook. A cultural and political transformation brought Sanders, and more precisely his message, to the forefront. And the people who did it don’t need to be told how to continue the mission.

We’re in an era of leaderless political engagement at the street level, where exercising power and expressing outrage frequently mirror one another.

The opportunity that is upon us is an unparalleled opportunity to resist the system as a largely united people. There are social forces stirring - from football players protesting social injustice, police brutality and inequality to average people who have been energized by the possibility of radical change during this election cycle.

These agendas don't need a political candidate to carry them forward, they need the people.

Left/progressives can use the same tools that they used to turn the Sanders election campaign into a political force to mount a resistance and change campaign to further a more radical agenda which is needed to deal the many urgent issues that we are facing. We can create an alternative culture of change with the media tools that we have at hand and build a movement.

The challenge we face is in achieving solidarity both amongst ourselves and with a larger community.

We are a fractious bunch that falls easily into argument about everything from elections and candidates to what sorts of language is proper to be used by activists. These arguments tend to split up our groups and make us less effective in spreading an agenda.

My $.02. Your mileage may vary.