Tomorrow the US electorate goes to the polls, aside from some 90 or so million who have already cast and mailed their ballots. This is a seismic election - it is the culmination of four years of Donald Trump disrupting and dividing, whilst directlng US internal capital and foreign policy towards making America great again.
Those of us who know something of the USA, have never doubted her greatness or her place in the world. She is still a democracy and the world's largest economy. Whither she goes, so must we all who live in democracies and those who seek to protect them.
Tomorrow home town America will have an infrequent if more common demonstration of the Left and Right in politics. We cannot know who may win. Indeed the result will likely be contested legally, victory claimed illegally and be dragged through the courts in a scene similar to the hanging chads of Jeb Bush's Florida for some weeks.
We can but wish that the founding fathers, those who bequeathed life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness to their descendents and those who died in an horrific civil war to preserve a great union, might whisper in the ear of all voters and US citizens tomorrow. They might whisper of the importance of voting, not for the world we fear to lose, but the one we deserve to build.
The Democratic party has careered left, accommodating behaviours of public unrest, demonstration and violence with too little condemnation or regard. Whilst Covid19 has been bungled by the administration, the shut downs envisaged to contain the virus will surely hammer the US economy further. Joe Biden appears fundamentally to be a decent and caring human being. But with a left wing building in his party, whose radical elements are anti-industry and who see the world as somehow rotten to the core, he has ballast in his balloon he must surely wish he were without.
They say all elections like stock market crashes are the same...ultimately. I disagree. This time I'm prepared to speak those words every one sees as a cliche - "This time...it really is different"!
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