this is the cycle where you should vote for the greens in the united states if you always wanted to but were afraid to. the united states needs a systemic third party that will pull the democrats left, even if they rarely or never win.

the reality is that trump might be the lesser evil, right now and that he's almost certainly correct in claiming that, in the long run, biden's presidency will be seen as the worst, or one of the worst. i've made that claim myself in this space, several years ago.

i would rank trump somewhere in the middle of the pack of presidents of the last 50 years. he was nowhere near as bad as bush, jr and he was nowhere near as corrupt as reagan. whether he was better or worse than clinton in terms of actual policy is a coin toss, even if clinton can honestly and fairly blame everything on the republican senate.

biden is more near bush jr territory - economic collapse, health disasters, terrible global wars due to incompetence and mismanagement at the highest level, the perception by others and projection of abject weakness, etc. all we need is miami to sink into the ocean this summer, and we're reliving history as farce.

vote green if you want to and if you can.

as was the case in italy, fears that marine le pen is some kind of fascist are not supported by facts or evidence, although her father did have some pretty creepy policies. in fact, i would describe marine le pen as a real secular leftist, and contrast her against the fake left that has taken over the popular concept of what a left means. on virtually every point, including a strong embrace of secularism, le pen aligns on the traditional left, and not on the traditional right. this is actually very different than meloni in italy, who is by any definition of the term a very traditional conservative.

i took a look through their most recent platform the other day and while there are a few planks in it that are stupid (you don't want to refuse to educate the children of illegal immigrants. that is stupid. that is the last thing you want to do. if anything, you want to take them away from their parents and send the to boarding schools, but you don't want a mass of uneducated, economically disadvantaged immigrants in your country, that is an algorithm for crime.), i actually agreed with most of it, and i would have endorsed her over macron, which is stated as a hard leftist. 

france actually needs this. france needs somebody willing to strongly enforce women's rights in a society where they are perhaps waning. france needs a strong voice for secularism, to refresh the values of the revolution. french secularism is different than american secularism, and i would rather see most of the world adopt revolutionary french secularism than the more conservative voltaire-penned secularism of jeffersonian and madisonian democracy.

ultimately, le pen and her new friend there are being given the opportunity to show us what they're going to do. they might blow it in a barrage of stupid populism. or they might be a breath of fresh air and be exactly what france needs just right now. we'll have to see what they do.