We always skip ahead to Thermidor

I know that to most cable news audiences it feels like there's a lot of chaos and stuff going on right now. But, in reality, US politics has been and remains a reliably steady edifice.  The ruling establishment can't be displaced by social upheaval because it is so thoroughly disconnected from it.  The population at large can suffer tremendously but most of them don't matter in the calculus. 

There can be unrest in the streets all summer. People can lose their jobs, lose their homes, lose their lives to an uncontrolled disease, even. But, while those are the problems of the people, generally they are not the problems of the electorate. The electorate is worried about the blowback from all that other stuff. And that is what our politics responds to. Which is why, in times of crisis, the message that goes up the flagpole isn't so much that we need to address the crisis itself but instead that we need to keep the reaction to it under control.  

So, in a Presidential election conducted under these circumstances, the candidates compete to "win the week" by best reflecting their targeted voters' fear of the people. Which is why this week we have one candidate accusing the other of being a "radical left anarchist" who will not keep you "safe."

In formally accepting the Republican presidential nomination on Thursday, Trump laid out a central attack line for his campaign: accusing the Democratic Party of standing with "anarchists, agitators, rioters, looters and flag burners." 

Trump claimed that a victory Nov. 3 by Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden would usher in an era of lawlessness. "No one will be safe in Biden's America," the president said.

While the other candidate is buying ads to reassure his targeted voters that, no no that is not it at all, in fact he hates the radical agitators as much as the other guy.  Moreso, maybe.  

Mr. Biden has repeatedly condemned instances in which protests for racial justice have burst into violence, accusing Mr. Trump of stoking divisions and laying blame for any chaos on the current occupant of the White House.

But the ad — part of a $45 million one-week television and digital purchase that is by far the campaign’s largest to date — is the first time that Mr. Biden has put this pushback on issues of crime and public safety into a major paid advertising program.

“I want to make it absolutely clear,” Mr. Biden says as images flash of burned-out cars and buildings and a confrontation with the police. “Rioting is not protesting. Looting is not protesting. And those who do it should be prosecuted.”

It's been a rough summer for a lot of reasons. But the fact that a lot of people ran out into the streets to be punched and gassed by cops is destined to be remembered only as.. that summer when people got punched and gassed by cops.  Because the next step of connecting that upheaval to a political movement for change is impossible in this system.  It can only be incorporated in terms of the reaction against it. We skip right past the revolution every time.