Over the last 6 years or so, I've gotten really into policy analysis and data-driven politics. The things is, everything I've learned feels totally useless because we've entered into a post-policy era in American politics. Everything is going to be determined by arbitrary discretion of a few individuals at the top. Your average representative and senator have no power. All power is held by the President, the Speaker, and the Majority Leader—three individuals. Policy analysis only matters in a democratic world and this isn't a democracy anymore, at least not at the federal level. There's no point in knowing what the best tax policy or monetary policy is if citizens can't influence politics whatsoever. Our only hope is to turn towards local politics, democratize our local politics and make individual states into little social democracies. If Finland can be a social democracy without being a sovereign issuer of currency, so can California or Colorado. And maybe we need to look at the United States as more akin to the European Union and less as a monolithic nation. America is another Europe not another Great Britain.
We also need to seriously start working on growing a serious 3rd party, one with a minimalist yet radical platform that most Americans can get behind. Something like the Alliance Party. We get multiple parties to form an alliance yet retain their own separate identities as well. We could probably get the DSA, SPUSA, Green Party, and American Solidarity Party to agree on a single platform. Some of the more divicive stuff (like abortion) can be left off of the unified platform. Right now, we need to abandon the Democratic Party while uniting against the fascist Republican Party. Instead of begrudgingly voting Dem as the lesser of 2 evils, we need to cut down the 2 evil trees altogether.
In the meantime, we vote the lesser evil in this election, but immediately start looking to 2024 and see if we can break the two-party system in the next election. The only time the two-party duopoly has ever been broken in America was when coalitions of third parties united against it in order to oust and replace one of the main parties.