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Now that we’ve taken off our holiday party masks and furtively tiptoed into 2024, the presidential election looms only ten months away.

I find myself violently disinterested in the whole sorry affair. I can’t recall a time in my life when I cared less about the candidates or the outcome.

It wasn’t always this way.

I was barely out of diapers when Lyndon Johnson thrashed Barry Goldwater in 1964, so I can’t be faulted for not doing my civic duty and paying attention to that election. But when Richard Nixon ran against Hubert Humphrey in 1968, I recall the other seven-year-olds being passionately involved to the point where we held an event in our schoolyard in which the kids stumped for their chosen candidates. I remember little freckle-faced Kathy McNeila holding a pro-Nixon picket sign that read DUMP THE HUMP.

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In sixth grade I defaced my wooden school desk with a “McGOVERN ’72” etching. I can think of no other reason for preferring him to Nixon other than the fact that I thought he had better sideburns than Nixon.

During America’s Bicentennial, when I was 15 and a toothy upstart from Georgia named Jimmy Carter ran against a wooden clod named Gerald Ford, I wanted Carter to win because not only did he tell Playboy that he’d “looked on a lot of women with lust” — just as I’d been doing — but he popularized the term “born-again Christian” for the American public, and even though I’d been lusting after women, I was also a born-again Christian.

The reasons I preferred one candidate over another were hardly profound, but I think that’s always been the case with most people — even those of voting age. If anything, voting for George McGovern because he had good sideburns was probably wiser than voting for his policies.

I’ve voted in only five presidential elections, and I only picked a winner once: Donald Trump in 2016. On a superficial level, he was far funnier than the muff-diving she-beast Hillary Clinton. But he also talked about deeper matters: illegal immigration, the national debt, and the offshoring of America’s economy. Most importantly to me, Trump seemed like the perfect antidote to censorship-hungry Leftists. As a writer who traffics in ideas and attitudes that aren’t rubber-stamped by the reigning culture czars, I felt I’d have an easier time finding paid work under Trump than under Obama.

But none of the things he promised came true. Deportations of illegals decreased, the national debt increased at a record pace, and America suffered a net loss of manufacturing jobs. Worst of all, the censorship, ostracism, and financial deplatforming of non-Leftists reached levels that were previously unimaginable.

When I ask people who still support Trump what he accomplished as president, the typical answer is that he “owned the libs,” but the record suggests that the libs owned him.

And for all of his vaunted racism, Trump was an absolute disaster as a racist — possibly the lamest racist of all time. He failed to directly address white people as a constituency even once, and he rewarded black Americans for rioting throughout the summer of 2020 with a half-trillion-dollar “Platinum Plan.”

So Trump was either conning us from the start, or a president can’t really accomplish much. I suspect it’s more of the latter. Trump is now promising that if he gets reelected, he’ll finish what he never even managed to start during his first term.

He’s better than Joe Biden, but that’s like saying foot fungus is better than anal warts. Biden is a sclerotic, doddering embarrassment and the least presidential of all the presidents, but he’s also a perfect symbol of America in its current state. I’m angrier at Trump because I never expected anything from Biden.

And now, before the primaries have even started, it appears that 2024 will be a repeat of 2020, only with more body fat and Alzheimer’s. But no matter who is declared the winner, you can bet your last worthless Federal Reserve Note that there will be riots. Beyond the unconquerable national debt, a clear sign that we’re a broken country is that in the past two elections, the side that was declared the loser refused to accept the official results. In 2016, Democrats blamed Russian collusion. In 2020, Republicans blamed voter fraud. I’ve never bothered to get into who was right and who was wrong because I don’t trust either side and I don’t think it ultimately matters when the entire system is built on lies.

The saddest thing of all is that democracy would be stupid even if it was honest. Social media is a virus that led to many plagues, but at least it revealed how painfully vapid most people are about politics. If you think ordinary rappers are dumb, you’d be correct — but have you ever seen a MAGA rapper?

Some tribes are more authentic than others. Some emerge from organic processes based on self-preservation, while others are intentionally fabricated as a distraction while everyone gets marched to the slaughterhouse. There is nothing about the Left-Right/blue-red/Dem-Repub antipathy that is natural, nothing that hasn’t been calculated and manipulated to set the rubes at one another’s throats. But don’t you realize that our side is the good side and their side is the bad side? Sure, they think they’re the good guys and we’re the bad guys, but they’re wrong and we’re right. There are no good guys and bad guys in all this — only morons and assholes.

So I’ll be sitting this one out, and you can call me all the names you want. You can keep pretending that your vote matters and that politicians will listen to you rather than to their donors. Maybe I’ve been manipulated into not caring just as you’ve been manipulated into caring, and we’re all idiots, or else we’d be the ones doing the manipulating. I’m open to that option.

America’s problems are far bigger than which guy gets elected president. The country’s population has been diversified to the point where even pretending it’s a nation is imbecilic. The economy has been indentured to hostile interests to a degree where it’s mathematically impossible to ever break even. America’s decline has almost certainly been engineered, and it has proceeded apace regardless of who gets elected president. When a patient is on his deathbed, calling in a new doctor won’t help — especially when you have to choose between two doctors who both helped make him sick.