In a recent comment I laid out my -- more or less -- core statement on the presidential race. Here's what I said:

the public interest is currently served by a proliferation of candidates who are not Joe Biden and who are not Republicans.

Here's the supporting prediction. Unless something really unexpected happens, a Republican is going to win the White House next year. The Republicans will figure out how to avoid doing what Donald Trump did in 2020 -- they won't squander their advantages on their candidate's ego-trip this time around. The Democratic Party opposition to, you know, democracy, is a really bad look, "the economy" is not the winner the Democrats think it is, and damned few people really care deeply about Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, two individuals outstandingly incapable of promoting themselves to voters, as opposed to money.

(I might add that Biden is going to win the Dem nomination on a vote of the superdelegates, if RFK Jr. and/or Marianne Williamson don't give up first. This is America, where if you grease enough palms something will happen. The point of RFK Jr. and Marianne Williamson is to bring to the Democratic Party, once again, the disrepute it has most clearly earned.)

Whichever Republican wins in November of 2024 will be hampered by a divided Congress, like the one we have now. Unlike with the Presidential race, Democrats in Congressional races are free to run on actual issues, and so they should have little trouble defeating Republicans and establishing a slim majority in one if not both houses of Congress.

And so nothing will change. Riley and Brenner suggested an essential truth:

Under political capitalism, raw political power, rather than productive investment, is the key determinant of the rate of return. This new form of accumulation is associated with a series of novel mechanisms of ‘politically constituted rip-off’. These include an escalating series of tax breaks, the privatization of public assets at bargain-basement prices, quantitative easing plus ultra-low interest rates, to promote stock-market speculation—and, crucially, massive state spending aimed directly at private industry, with trickledown effects for the broader population: Bush’s Prescription Drug legislation, Obama’s Affordable Care Act, Trump’s CARES Act, Biden’s American Rescue Plan, the Infrastructure and CHIPS Acts and the Inflation Reduction Act. All these mechanisms of surplus extraction are openly and obviously political. They allow for returns, not on the basis of investment in plant, equipment, labour and inputs to produce use values, but rather on the basis of investments in politics.

Beyond US domination by two sold-out political parties, in the US elections are determined by demographics. This is so for numerous reasons -- people behave politically as the political culture industry has buttonholed them to behave. The most important reason, though, is that the creative diversity that would otherwise be "the Left" is reduced to silence by the Democratic Party. The reduction to silence has gone on for so long that "the Left" has lost a lot of its creative impulse. The reduction to silence has been the elites' crowning political achievement of the past forty years, in which politics has been reduced to voting and voting to voting for the lesser of evils, which the Democrats pretend is good. Conversation about, say, what "good things" Joe Biden has in fact done, or what "competencies" are in fact displayed by Kamala Harris or Pete Buttigieg, or why the Democrats aren't in fact planning to hold debates -- well, those topics help the Republicans, so Democrats don't discuss them.

The actual Biden base reality looks like this:

In the midst of the Breaking Points discussion of "wow they're concerned now," Ryan Grim cited "one of the most robust economies of the last fifty years." I guess the basis for this assessment is a cluster of statistics that were cited last year:

November’s jobs report defied analysts’ expectations, adding 263,000 new roles and keeping America’s jobless rate at 3.7%, almost a half-century low.

The Federal Reserve’s favorite inflation gauge, the PCE Price Index, finally showed signs of cooling.

Gross domestic product grew at a 2.9% annualized rate last quarter, a sharp bounce back from shrinking in the first half of the year.

None of these statistics tells us anything about, say, the net worth of the working class, clearly the most important statistic. There can be a lot of jobs and -- at the same time -- none of them would pay enough for the workers to afford rents raised by decades of rent inflation. Sure, anyone can wash dishes for a restaurant for $15/hour today. Meanwhile, "inflation," by which is excluded a lot of actual inflations, is being solved by making it more expensive to take out a mortgage. And GDP doesn't tell us who actually gets this "gross domestic product." So we might assume that the statistics basically report upon a "poison bloom," a hurrah of the type the American economy saw in 2006, before the eventual downturn when the Saudis cut oil production to the point when the American economy starts to scream.

As for Europe, it looks like Aurelien has an idea or two about its fate. What this post says is echoed in a lot of other places:

Since the Left has thoughtfully committed suicide in those parts of Europe where it has not long been an active part of the (professional-managerial class) elite already, the field is open for parties of the Right (and even “extreme Right”) to take power, since they will be the only parties that even talk about the issues that interest ordinary people. (Hint: Ukraine is not one of them.)