yeah, it's intentional total gridlock. any candidate for meaningful change has to battle through a dozen layers of increasingly impossible barriers, while acceptable candidates like Harris are just plucked out of semi-obscurity and made the presidential candidate with popularity being no problem. the current third parties are probably dead-ends in terms of using them as a vessel for change, but I reckon there will eventually be a point where organizations and parties arise organically out of the working class and those will have actual staying power. That the left and its ideologies are mostly kept in higher education and academia (which are places where liberalism can be instilled and intellectuals either isolated or co-opted) is not an accident, as it seeks to prevent the working class gaining class consciousness. But there are vast populations of exploited people who have the potential to form a revolutionary base; not only those who still work in factories where the means of production are accessible to seize, but also more generally among groups like native Americans, black people, those of Central/South American descent, and so on.

that being said, I think many of us here hypothesize that a working class uprising is unlikely until imperial relationships break down, if by nothing else observing the historical fact that revolutions rarely occur inside the imperial core. the timeline for this is very hard to predict - most of us prior to 2022 and definitely prior to 2020 would have said many decades, but now we're looking at glaring failures at American military projection with its navy vulnerable to even very poor nations, and the pace will likely accelerate, so it's good to be prepared as SkimmeringKoi says.