In this tumultuous US election there seems, for once, to be a genuine choice on offer about which kind of ideas will spend four years being thwarted in a congressional logjam. This year’s race has already spawned thousands of newspaper articles and even a Book of Revelation. It’s actually hard to find a clip of Donald Trump’s campaign that doesn’t look like a RoboCop insert. Then again, saying that a US election is particularly ridiculous is a bit like saying that Towie has jumped the shark. Unfortunately, even the most horrified coverage of this depraved contest assumes that it’s the election that’s the problem and not the society that produces it.

American elections are traditionally held on a Tuesday. This is because it allowed people to worship on Sunday, go to the town hall on Monday, vote on Tuesday and leave Wednesday clear for market. In Britain, we have elections on a Thursday because everyone was too pissed on a Friday. American elections always seem incredibly complicated to us, which is probably a bit rich when we’re about to have a nationwide referendum on Europe to decide who’s going to be running the Tory party.

One feature of this election is the way that the elite of the Republican party seem to have become completely estranged from their own electorate. Of course, they always worked against the interests of their voters, but they used to at least understand who they were and what they wanted. With almost infinite resources, the closest they’ve got to producing a popular candidate is Ted Cruz: a cross between a permanently disappointed sitcom vampire and the high school yearbook photo of every serial killer of the modern era.

The Republicans seem to be shocked that the result of decades of polarising rhetoric is a polarised society. The conservative establishment has spoken in a language of constant crisis, despite being ridiculously well served by the status quo, and it’s surprising how well the fear campaign has worked, considering that most of the country is on anti-anxiety medication. Conservatives have focused on false crises of international terror and immigration, little recognising that many voters have been equating that narrative with their own real crises of unemployment, debt and foreclosure. Donald Trump has simply cast himself as a solution. Trump is in many ways just saying what the other candidates would say on cocaine, but he’s also a unity candidate. His hope is to bring all of America together in their rejection of reality.

Trump divides his time between working some kind of King Ralph angle, and claiming that he’s going to make the US great again by using his business experience. We can only assume that means repeatedly declaring it bankrupt, then changing its name so he can just shake off all the debt. Trump’s one liberal policy seems to be his desire to pump more funding into mental health – which I’ve taken the liberty of interpreting as a massive cry for help. You can actually make your own Trump policies by going through the incinerator at the Daily Mail and picking through the dust for anything they thought might get them prosecuted. His position on climate change is “How can there be global warming when it’s still so cold in my soul?”

For anyone who has ever asked why the US needs to address the issue of reparations for its history of slavery, Donald Trump is why. He is the living embodiment of America’s unresolved issues. “How on earth can America consider expelling people of a different faith?!” an appalled England asks of a country created by the people they expelled for having a different faith. If you’re small, black and always felt that you didn’t have the confidence to crowd surf, Trump’s political rallies must come as a godsend. God knows who you vote for if you’re black in the USA – I guess all the politicians think black people are too preoccupied with videoing the police with their one lowered hand. Interestingly, in Nevada 45% of Latino votes went to Trump. Perhaps this indicates that people’s identities are more sophisticated than the clumsy definitions that political machinery uses to appraise them. Indeed, the very idea of racial groups as homogeneous is probably only possible in a racist society.

Trump seems to have the emotional range of a Power Rangers villain and the social skills of a teenage Minotaur. He looks like a pumpkin having a nervous breakdown, talks like the words are being fired out of his mouth by a tennis ball launcher and has the general manner of an arrogant televangelist suspected of murder by Columbo. His approach to public speaking? “If in doubt, switch to your internal monologue.” His core demographic? Possibly men whose holiday destinations would significantly overlap with a list of missing women. Trump is bringing out people who’ve never voted, people who felt they had no one to speak for them until now, people who throw microwaved beans at the television and people who go shopping in their pyjamas. And who knows, if Trump’s supporters are using their eight-fingered fists to make banners and red hats rather than drunkenly beating their kid into a coma that they won’t let a black doctor treat, maybe that’s a good thing. Trump knows that he appeals to people who are suspicious not just of political elites but everything those elites believe in, including rationality, and when confronted with anything empirical instinctively retreats into unverifiable anecdotes.

Trump/Sanders might actually end up being an interesting election centring on detailed arguments about trade and jobs, and Trump might come off really badly, as these are areas on which he has the firm grasp of a stroke victim eating an eclair. It’s certainly been entertaining to watch Sanders try to convey a message of hope through the dark prism of the US’s Stage 4 corporate media. Aside from all the obvious problems of inherent bias, he has to energise people by asking them to engage in the passive activity of watching him on television, has to ask for activism and a more sophisticated understanding of political problems through a medium that is all about voyeurism and simplification. It reminds me of when you used to see communists in the city centre of a Saturday, trying to explain Marxism to people while they were out shopping.

A Bernie Sanders presidency would certainly be entertaining, not least because at 74 by the end of a second term he’ll think that he’s Beyonce. If you want a president who’s going to sort out healthcare, the ideal incumbent is someone who’s going to be using it a lot, really soon. Then again, if there’s one advantage to being the first socialist president of the United States, it’s that dying of old age isn’t really going to be a big worry. Sanders will be the first Jewish man to run for president and Republican elites seem to hate everything about Jews, except Israel. It says something about the incredible strength of antisemitism that paranoid ideas about Jews controlling the media and banking systems persist even among the people who control the media and banking systems.

Trump poised for Wisconsin setback after campaign's worst week Read more

Hillary Clinton hasn’t really had any idea how to deal with Sanders. To continue to calmly explain why someone ahead of you in general election polling is unelectable (and Clinton hates to see a leader being unelectable, unless they’re a dictator in some vassal state) suggests that some of her personal stiffness has seeped into what seems increasingly a detached and inflexible campaign. On the campaign trail, she’s a cynical power player projecting the weary joy of a shopping mall Santa while inside her burns the fury of Michael Corleone having to do a meet and greet at a farmers’ market in Idaho. She seems to shake hands with each member of the public as if musing on all the things she could do to them if only they were Libyan.

I know this all sounds like a lazy swipe at Clinton for being an uncaring android, and of course it is, but there’s a serious point. The sort of presentation strategy that would work best against Trump – a tireless public servant saddened at having to deal with the insults of a reality show star – is probably well outwith her abilities as a performer. Also, Trump fares best against candidates who he can paint as opportunistic insiders subservient to corporate interests, and Clinton can only accentuate those qualities as she pivots to the right to take him on. The sentiments she has to fake in a campaign – joy, relaxation, a desire to reach out to people – are all incredibly difficult for her. Luckily, the palette of emotions we can expect of her presidency – bitter triumph, cynicism and indifference – are well within her range.

Clinton will very likely beat Trump decisively because he is even more unpopular with Republicans than she is with Democrats. There’s every chance that conservative donor money will start to flow towards Clinton who at least knows to speak very carefully about the things that really matter, like trade deals. At least we’ll get the entertainment of watching her trying to destroy Isis using the methods by which she helped to create Isis, turning the Middle East into an endless game of Whac-A-Mole. For America, and indeed the rest of the world, Clinton versus Trump will be like being on a bus being driven at high speed towards a cliff by a psychopath, where there’s a chance that a chimpanzee might grab control of the steering wheel. It’s not a question of whether this will make things better or worse, it’s more that the whole idea of “better” may be gradually ceasing to exist.