Elections, policies and no real choice

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 07/05/2024 (506 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When done properly, democracy can be a tool for citizens to influence the policy choices of their governing body. But is that how we practise democracy in North America?

While we do have similar issues here in Canada, there is no better example of failed democracy than south of the border. With a U.S. election looming this year, there will be much attention paid to the differences between the only two real choices offered to the American people.

I am not here to contend that those differences don’t exist or that the choice doesn’t matter.

However, there are some very pivotal ways in which the Democrats and the Republicans don’t differ significantly, and it behooves us to take note.

For example, on college campuses across the country students are protesting the continued Israeli assault on Gaza, demanding that their schools divest from any ventures which might be helping fund the aggression.

This is a movement which has grown after Columbia University called in the police to crack down on their student protest, which even the NYPD has stated was peaceful. Regardless, police made at least 108 arrests, which could lead to criminal records that would impede many potential career paths those students are at the university to pursue.

After years of being inundated with hand-wringing think pieces about how “the left” is supposedly stifling free speech on campuses, we are now seeing what actual suppression of speech looks like. Instruments of the State have been mobilized to quash the peaceful purveyors of a certain point of view.

What is the Biden administration’s reaction to this? To “condemn the antisemitic protests.” Despite there being very sparse examples of antisemitism at any of the campus protests, and none cited at the one on Columbia’s campus, the Biden administration has tacitly endorsed these crackdowns on free speech on the bogus basis of conflating antizionism with antisemitism.

Clearly this is all in service of the Biden administration’s continued support for Israel’s brutal campaign against Palestinians. It should go without saying Trump and the Republicans would not be a more sober voice on the matter. So what option is there for voters come election time?

This isn’t the only foreign policy issue that the election will have little impact on. Neither party will stop arming the Saudis, despite the devastating campaign they are prosecuting in Yemen. In fact, it’s something of a bipartisan tradition to disseminate arms to almost anyone, as long as they have the interests of American global capital at heart.

More of the same closer to home as well, as the Democrats recently tabled a bill that was basically a Republican wish list for dealing with immigration at the southern border.

Among the worst provisions in the bill was a cap on migrants crossing the border, which could see even asylum seekers expelled if the threshold is met, essentially reducing sanctuary for refugees to a Black Friday door crasher event. The bill would also give the president the power to unilaterally shut down the border as they see fit; a reckless proposal at the best of times, but insane to enact months before Donald Trump possibly retakes office.

Perhaps the most aggravating part of all this is that we know how incensed the Democrats would act if it were a Republican overseeing all this from the oval office.

We saw it plainly during Trump’s term, when he was making similar comments about shutting down the border.

And oh, how Democrats love to venerate protests from the past, like those for civil rights and those against the Vietnam War, yet fail to support contemporary protests against Israel’s incursion into Gaza. Because it’s so much easier to co-opt victories already won, which the status quo has already adapted to, and so no actual struggle against entrenched power is required of you.

These are by no means the only issues where voters are offered no significant choice of leadership either. So what are we left to do about it? I’m not saying the solution is to vote third party.

In fact, voting Democrat is probably the utilitarian option that would inflict the least harm, distasteful as it is for them to get away with a policy platform that mostly consists of “did you see how bad the other guy is?” But perhaps it is time to acknowledge that when these are the options we are given, we can only conclude that the powers that be do not see these issues as problems at all.

Stripped of their capacity to make a meaningful impact on such important matters, what is left for a citizenry to do?

Alex Passey is a Winnipeg author.