Elections, embedded in cyclical time, are sometimes interpreted as pivotal events that shape longer histories. Such histories can be narrated as slow change, fast change, or stasis; crisis or normalcy; repetitive or linear process; progress or regress. Anthropologists are attuned as well to smaller-scale temporalities. They listen for different personal experiences of time and observe social configurations in which they nest.

Media depictions of the election shape our sense of time. Television news graphics for weeks display the countdown to election day: 25 days…12 days, 11 days, 10 days…! But days are slow markers of election time in an age when tweets can drive news cycles. If we expand the time frame a bit, we have reason to wonder if the U.S. election actually will be over on November 8. Will the outcome be contested? Will one contender fracture democratic tradition by refusing to concede to the winner? Widening the time frame again, what imaginings of America’s past or what politics of memory are evoked in one candidate’s slogan “Make America Great Again”?

Psychologists report that people are experiencing much more anxiety than usual this election season—another critical time signal. “For women,” the New York Times tells us, “particularly those who have been victims of sexual assault, the election has triggered painful memories.” Parents and school officials report a surge in bullying and racialized aggression among children. Their behavior mirrors the rhetoric and actions of a presidential candidate and some of his supporters. While ahistorical frames are common in election commentary, this year’s upsurge in nativism—open displays of anti-immigrant sentiment and scapegoating—echoes nativist outbursts in periods such as the 1850s and 1920s. Today’s iteration of nativism in this nation of immigrants also has counterparts in France, Germany, Britain, and elsewhere. Though the vitriol of this year’s campaign and the 2016 Republican presidential nominee’s popularity, temperament, and rhetoric have historical precedents that extend back much longer than a century, it is the immediate present that fixates public attention.

And yet election time, for many, may also be what Sian Lazar in a different context terms “attritional time”—a period of “constant protest or negotiation, the continuance of the day to day of political life when there is no resolution in sight to a particular conflict or problem, coupled occasionally with a dramatization of what can become quite banal over time.” Disenchantment with formal political parties and institutions or with representative democracy, scholars such as Charles Tilley and Sidney Tarrow argue, contributes to a recent upswing in political activism expressed through protest or social movements. On a scale not seen in decades, participants mobilize for living wages, racial justice, environmental protections, corporate accountability, and immigrants’ rights in struggles that will continue no matter who wins the 2016 election. So too the struggles of those who do not protest in the streets but who strive daily to survive in low-wage jobs or who can find no job at all or who live one health emergency away from bankruptcy. In the late-1960s a minimum wage job “could lift a family of three out of poverty,” but today that same family earns about $15,000 a year, which is $4,000 below the poverty line. These circumstances are not inevitable; they are historically contingent outcomes of political and policy choices.

A final temporal query: why is the U.S. presidential campaign period so much longer than that of many other electoral democracies? And why is the campaign longer today than it was a few decades ago in this country—as in 1952, when Dwight D. Eisenhower only began his run in the spring of that year, and Labor Day was considered the beginning of serious campaigning. Part of the answer lies in changes in the nomination process and state primary system. While longer campaigns allow time for the public to become acquainted with lesser-known candidates, extended campaigns also require contenders to raise more money, and they generate more advertising revenue for news media.

An Internet meme shared by candidates of both major political parties this year is “This Is Fine” dog—“a web comic by K.C. Green, of a dog sitting in a room engulfed in flames, but he says, ‘This is fine.’” Many American voters, Brad Kim observes in the New York Times interview just quoted, feel that in this election “the world is ending.” That experience of time matters for voter turnout, as well for the civility of post-election life. A closing irony: an intense public desire for the 2016 election process to be over slows down our perception of time’s passage.

“America is a shining example of how to hold a free and fair election, right?” asks Bassem Youssef, a comedian and former heart surgeon who is often referred to as “the Egyptian Jon Stewart.” Astute answers to that question about the condition of U.S. democracy often come from foreigners such as satirists, as well as my East African research interlocutors.

Like Jon Stewart and Trevor Noah (The Daily Show), Stephen Colbert (The Colbert Report), and Jon Oliver (Last Week Tonight), Bassem Youssef uses irony and satire to hold a mirror up to society, and to unsettle conventional political and media narratives. State political pressure forced termination of the popular satirical news show Youssef created in Egypt during the Arab Spring. He then moved to the United States, became a fellow at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics in 2015, and in 2016 started a new show in the United States called “Democracy Handbook” on Fusion TV. As foreigners, Youssef, Jon Oliver (British), and Trevor Noah (South African) wittily play off stereotypes of their own home regions as they comment on events in the United States—such as Trevor Noah’s Daily Show segment comparing the 2016 Republican presidential nominee to African dictators.

When I was in Kenya during the July 2016 Republican National Convention, a farmer asked me about news reports that the Republican presidential nominee’s wife had plagiarized Michelle Obama’s 2008 speech to the Democratic National Convention. That story–widely reported in Kenyan and other international news media–was soon eclipsed by a cascade of new campaign controversies that sent puzzling signals to the rest of the world. In their Savage Minds post last week, Daniel Goldstein and Raúl Rodriguez Arancibia offered a Bolivian’s perspective on the U.S. presidential contest. I asked Kenyan scientist Dr. Nyaga Kinyua (a pseudonym) for his thoughts on the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Dr. Kinyua lives in Nairobi and he recently spent a few years studying for an advanced degree in the United States. In mid-2016, Secretary of State John Kerry announced that the United States would assist Kenya with its 2017 national election preparations by providing over $25 million (22 million euros) this year “in order to support [Kenya’s]…electoral process into next year…we want to strengthen your election operations,” said Kerry. (Daniel Branch provides one of many fine accounts of Kenya’s political history.)

Dr. Kinyua’s response to Kerry’s announcement was skeptical: “The U.S. does not even have the best machines for elections!” His comment addresses a core weakness of the U.S. electoral system (and one that gets little attention from dominant U.S. news media): much voting technology is outdated and many electronic voting machines are vulnerable to tampering or hacking and lack paper verification systems. The problem is not new. The Daily Show spoofed U.S. voting machines in 2004 (when Jon Stewart was host) and again in 2015 (with Trevor Noah as host). More than a decade ago, Los Angeles musician Clifford J. Tasner wrote a satirical song called “Voting Machine”–with lyrics such as “We’re rigging the election with our new voting machine!”

In addition to voting machine problems, many states have eliminated a number of polling stations, shortened early voting and registration periods, passed new voter identification laws, and purged voter rolls (as the ACLU and other organizations have documented). Such measures especially disadvantage likely Democratic voters by depressing turnout by Latino, African-American, and Asian-American voters. The Brennan Center for Justice states that “in 2016, 14 states will have new voting restrictions in place for the first time in a presidential election.” After the disputed Florida vote count in the 2000 presidential election, when the Supreme Court determined the outcome, African political scientists joked about sending election observers from Africa to the United States. The reverse scenario of course is well institutionalized.

Voter suppression and other flaws in the electoral process such as gerrymandering are obscured by daily news cycles focused on the political “horse race” (i.e., who said or tweeted what, or who is up or down in opinion polls today). Bassem Youssef, however, focuses on these under-reported electoral issues as he travels across the United States and interviews people for his Democracy Handbook show. With empathy and comedic deftness, he asks as well about topics such as neglected infrastructure, immigration, religion in politics, gun rights, and the Flint water crisis.

In a non-comedic register, Dr. Kinyua too is keenly attuned to ironies in the contemporary geopolitics of democracy talk. “It seems like there is something we are not told,” he said as he continued his comments on Secretary John Kerry’s mid-2016 announcement of U.S. election aid to Kenya. He wonders what conditions were attached to the aid, noting that not long after Kerry’s visit, new talks began on the conflict in South Sudan and Kenya altered its position in ways that are not yet fully known. He wonders if the government of that oil-rich country will be toppled with outside help, thereby destabilizing it for years. Taking a cue from Trump’s pronouncement that the United States should have taken control of Iraq’s oil, Dr. Kinyua remarks that when Trump says America is not winning anymore, he means the country is not grabbing whatever it should get out of foreign escapades such as overthrowing dictators. Africans “are being manipulated,” Dr. Kinyua says, and he contrasts a widespread sense of hidden agendas in foreign policy with Trump’s “bravado” and “reckless” talk that might actually reveal “underhanded deals” and hidden assumptions in foreign policy to which citizens of other countries would like to be alerted. His concern is not Trump, he adds, but rather standard foreign policy practices by rich countries such as the United States.

Since the United States and some European nations often criticize Africa for not being sufficiently democratic, and they routinely send delegations to monitor African elections, what might people on that continent think of a U.S. presidential candidate who tells his opponent during a televised debate that he will jail her if he becomes president? Shortly after the October 9 debate in St. Louis, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff (who frequently visits Africa) tweeted, “I’ve spent lots of time reporting in countries where winners do imprison losing candidates. Believe me, we don’t want to go there.” Political scientist Brendan Nyhan tweeted (the same night) that Trump’s comment about jailing Hillary Clinton is an “existential threat to democracy,” and he was not the only commentator to term that the debate’s “most important story.”

Dr. Kinyua remarks that Trump’s stated intention to jail Clinton “means that Trump has no faith in the investigation done earlier by the world’s most powerful investigation agency, the FBI. It also insinuates that an American president can influence the outcome of an investigation process, which is ironic for a country that has strong rule-of-law credentials and that is the moral bodyguard of the world.”

Egyptian news satirist and cardiologist Bassem Youssef said in July 2016: “well, my conclusion is that you still have a great democratic process here [in the United States]. My show…can serve as a warning to tell you that…there are certain practices that are happening here that are not far off of what I’ve seen in my part of the world…it’s scary. It’s kind of like I’m telling people, ‘Guys, we’re the prequel. Don’t do that.’”