I do wonder if the democratic party could produce much of anything viable at this point even with a concerted effort to do so. Biden seems to have largely gotten in on "he's not Trump". Bernie might have been a real shot at a milquetoast reformist, but even without the capitalists doing everything they could to stop him, the anti-anything-remotely-socialist-sounding rhetoric in the US is strong. And if we look at how pathetic Bernie's takes on the genocide against Palestine have been, who's to say he wouldn't have been funding it just like Biden is, but with slightly different rhetoric and so receiving much the same criticism Biden is.

Trump on the other hand, is willing to say he wants to do something drastically different. In practice, I'm not sure even he has any real intention of consolidating a new christo-fascist order, but he is at least willing to play the part of wanting to and that prolongs the belief for a little longer that the shambling burger empire can be changed significantly through voting.

I could see it being plausible that the capitalists would throw their support behind a Trump kind of figure getting rid of the facade of democracy because of not having much else of direction to go with it. How many times can they do the same Charlie Brown / Lucy Football maneuver while conditions continue to deteriorate for most USians before a critical mass of people go, "Yeah, this stuff is a bunch of BS and we're not going to feed into the facade anymore." The anything-but-Trump panic pushed by liberals seems to center on this idea that there is in fact a functional "democracy" and that Trump is going to destroy it, but nowhere in this panic do liberals explain why their candidates are so incredibly bad that a guy like Trump is viable in the first place.

It's bizarre watching them effectively tell people "we are one of the worst things there is in your universe, but vote for us anyway." And I'm not sure it's tactical ineptitude or neglect, so much as it is having reached the limits of pretending to care without meaningfully doing anything for regular people while in office. Obama did nothing to shake up anything while putting on a show like he was the kind of person who would. Biden has done nothing to shake up anything while the media acts like he's FDR. Liberals can pull out a list of minor stuff they've done, but none of it addresses the fundamentals and it's the fundamentals that leaves people open to a guy like Trump to come in and say, "I'm not going to legitimize how ridiculous and humiliating this system is." Of course, he's perfectly capable of legitimizing it anyway, while pretending not to, and I think that's much of what he did when he was in office before. But then there is the following he has who doesn't see it that way and they may push him to challenge the fundamentals more than he actually wants to himself. Shaking things up wouldn't exactly be a cozy thing to attempt. He'd be taking a lot of risk that the existing fascist forces of neoliberalism rally against him and make the remains of his life more painful, and I don't think his heart is really in it on the beliefs.