YES, DOUBLE DOWN ON THE AUTHENTICITY.

New York's Times gives a Mychal Denzel Smith a platform to grouse, "A Biden Win Won’t Cure My Trump-Era Depression." Sounds like he's a real fun guy, lets his mental state be defined by elections.  "I had to ask myself what it meant to live in a system that allowed for a proudly racist and sexist representative of the capitalist class to seize presidential power. I mourned for the younger version of myself that had cast his first vote for the first Black presidential candidate on a major party ticket and had his cynicism challenged when that candidate actually won."  But does he reflect on how the hopey-changey stuff didn't really work out so well, and that's how a guy who publicly pushed a theory that Barack Obama wasn't born in Hawaii then succeeded him as president?  ("As if anyone in 1961 would have faked a Hawaiian birth certificate for a young man named Barack Hussein Obama with the hopes of making him eligible for the presidency.")

But he's not optimistic about the election, even if Uncle Sam says, "Donald, you're fired!"  Get a load of why.

No, I never assumed that in my lifetime we would defeat the entrenched forces of white supremacist heteropatriarchal capitalism. But I had come around to believing that a slow, frustrating but ultimately sustainable victory and all the jubilation that would come along with it was something my friends’ children might someday experience.

That sense of possibility has largely dissipated. I am afraid every single day — of wildfires in California, of hurricanes on the Gulf Coast, of the police and ICE, of going to the grocery store in a pandemic, of Electoral College math.

Just once, I'd like to see some experimental prefigurative community of transformation modelling, in microcosm, modes of living that confer evolutionary advantages on their adopters and disrupting that white supremacist heteropatriarchal capitalism, but in six decades I just haven't seen it.

Perhaps, though, he's really warning all and sundry that a change of families in the White House does not mean an end to the chaos in the cities.

I know I can’t rely on a President Biden to cure my Trump-era depression. If he wins, it will simply represent a return to the normalcy favored by Democrats and the lie of American unity. A Biden presidency would not bring with it the same level of incompetence-meets-evil that we have suffered under the Trump administration. But without an agenda aimed at radically transforming (or in some cases eliminating altogether) the institutions that have caused so much harm, the best we can hope for is four years of bipartisan compromises that leave us facing the same challenges. Electing Mr. Biden is, at this point, a necessary measure to beat back the worst of the Trump era, but it is hardly a balm in and of itself.

Read between the lines in his essay, dear reader: the "radical transformation" is that of the so-called progressive wing of the Democrats.  Sorry, I want no part of it, too bad there's no provision in government as we understand it to volunteer for a control group.