The U.S. presidential election will take place in the midst of two emergencies. One is the COVID-19 pandemic and the other is the threat to human life and biosphere posed by the neoliberal economic system.
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A major contradiction of this state ideology is that free markets are posited as non-state-controlled spaces in which citizens may exercise their preferences and realize themselves as individuals.
Yet in practice, elites stack the deck in their favor by legislating advantages for themselves while imposing coercive forms of social control on the rest of us, including the criminalization of dissent. The result: racism, poverty, and militarism.
Electoral politics does not leave voters a way out of these maladies because both of the major political parties are beholden to corporate interests. Both endorse fracking, reject Medicare for all, refuse to condemn racist police violence, back the detention and deportation of immigrants, and put their benefactors on wall street before the rest of us.
And both parties support the unsustainable militarism that drains our economic resources into the coffers of the weapons industry and spreads war and death around the globe.
There is a good argument to be made, based on prioritizing the defense of human life and the biosphere, against continuing to vote for the lesser evil and finally devoting ourselves to building a third way.
But no matter who wins this election, the multi-racial popular resistance to the neoliberalism and racism will continue to be a necessary condition for preventing the slide towards fascism and keeping open the possibility of building a new world.