It’s happening all over again. The so-called presidential election campaign season in the US is narrowing down a lame group of candidates to the three or four lamest of the bunch.
Meanwhile, the so-called left in the United States argues amongst itself whether or not it should support Hilary or Obama who, despite the fact that one’s gender and the other’s skin tone make them appear to be proof of our enlightened age, are essentially representing the same old war and capitalist globalization crowd that has been running the country since at least the 1980s. There are some on the left who think a Ron Paul presidency is the way to go, given his complete opposition to the wars of the empire. This bunch of folks dismiss his incredibly anti-immigrant stance by pointing out that neither Clinton nor McCain are very progressive in that regard either. Of course, they are right but that is not the point. The point is that the immigrants have no true champion among any of the presidential contenders.
My point here is not to convince anyone to vote for any of the candidates. That would be hypocritical, since I can’t see myself pulling the lever (or touching the screen or whatever) for Obama, Hilary, McCain, Romney or Ron Paul. Of the six, only Paul has any position that I can agree with completely and that is his pledge to end the war immediately. Despite this pledge, I find it difficult to jump on his bandwagon simply because, (as I wrote a few weeks ago) I disagree with so many other positions he has taken. Judging from emails I have received, his leftish supporters consider this to be nitpicking. After all, they write, if he ends the war than we can move on to take care of the other problems. This is precisely why I can’t vote for him. His positions on so many other issues and his consequent solutions are completely opposed to mine, primarily because we have very different ideas about the nature of capitalism.
Other left-leaning friends are jumping onto the Obama bandwagon. Let’s hope, they tell me, that he doesn’t really mean all that stuff he said about Reagan or his opposition to universal health care. Let’s ignore those votes to fund the war and focus on his opposition to it before it began. While I consider the symbolism of a Black man running the United States to be important, if that symbol has no principles he wishes to make apparent (or if those principles are antithetical to leftists), then is it really that important of a symbol?
This same question can be asked about Hilary Clinton. The fact that she would be the first woman president of the US is symbolically important, but without any principles, how much does that symbol matter? If this election campaign so far has taught the left anything, it should have taught us that aspirants to the empire’s throne come in all sorts of packaging. Yet, like the numerous brands of canned soup on the supermarket shelf, they are still pretty much the same product.
This fact alone is enough to make me once again withhold my vote from the presidential race. While I can certainly vote against John McCain or Mitt Romney, I can’t in good conscience vote for any of their potential opponents. I was recently asked if white America feared a black man running the country more than they feared a woman running it. I can’t begin to give an answer to that, but I’m pretty certain that if whoever wins the Democratic nomination is opposed by McCain, they will probably take a page from LBJ’s playbook and portray their opponent as a warmonger (which is certainly accurate) while portraying themselves as the peaceful alternative, just like LBJ portrayed Goldwater and himself in 1964. And we know how that turned out.
Then again, November is a long ways away and lots can happen. What is unlikely to change though, is the false choice voters in the US are faced with. Like Murray Edelman once wrote, national elections provide the majority of a nation’s voters with “symbolic reassurance.” He continues, writing that elections “quiet resentments and doubts about particular political acts, reaffirm belief in the fundamental rationality and democratic character of the system, and thus fix conforming habits of future behavior.” No matter who ends up being candidates on the November ballot, this election proves Edelman’s statement in spades. After all, what other northern nation would have both a woman and a black man running for its highest office?
Doesn’t that prove that democracy and the American way really do work? Never mind that neither of these two candidates propose any substantive reforms to big business-as-usual. They aren’t George Bush or the party he hails from, goes the assumption, and that should be enough even though either one will carry on the nation’s wars and enhance the extremely wealthy at the expense of the poor and disenfranchised. Their existence at the head of the pack do exactly what Edelman meant when he wrote about reaffirmation and reassurance.
This doesn’t mean that things won’t change after the November election. In fact, working people and the poor might even feel a slight change in their living conditions for better or worse depending on who ends up in the White House. The fundamental economic and foreign policy reality will remain the same, however. And the rich and powerful will only become more so.