Some months later, it was the eve of the election. Pilder had already won the Democratic nomination by default. Meanwhile, Bubble had easily demolished the few remaining stragglers, who simply couldn’t compete with his relentless barrage of cruelty, crassness and viciousness.
The Presidential debates had turned out to be every bit as horrific (if horrifically entertaining also!) as expected.
And even the Machiavellian cunning of Pilder was at times lost for words; the Democratic candidate only had partial and half-hearted support from the party establishment, as he had never been supposed to win in the first place. Dark rumours persisted that the private view of the party hierarchy was that the Democrats would actually benefit if Pilder were to crash and burn; because it would kill off radical change in all forms, for a generation; if not ten, or twenty, or a hundred.
At the moment, it looked like Bubble was a shoe-in. This was not to say, of course, that support was universal. Some juvenile college students and professional grievance peddlers still doggedly clung to the corpse of Democratic progressivism; Bennie Pilder seemed to represent the dying scream, the final, desperate death throes of a doomed party. It was rumoured that the party might split completely if Pilder ended up suffering the commonly predicted electoral massacre. But nobody seriously thought that would make any difference, no matter what they said. Read more Chapter 32: It Depends on What “Democracy” Is (Honest Adolph, Volume III) ›