Is it bad that a week away from learning the federal election results, I feel the most politically disconnected? In the early hours of November 4th, a supposed winner will be declared between the two candidates. With such a declaration comes the inevitable gnashing of teeth from the losing party’s voter base; undoubtedly, they will dispute, contest, and generally belittle the results of November 3rd, only fueling voter discontent and further instilling the feeling that their loss occurred due to foul play. Into President Trump’s second year in office, you still heard people bemoaning the fact that he lost the popular vote while still winning the Electoral College. It’s a broken attempt to rewrite election rules after defeat to invalidate the victor; any political scientist worth their salt understands that the campaign strategy for winning the Electoral College versus winning a popular election is wholly different. Without the Electoral College, swing states like Florida and Michigan lose their luster for candidates, and both Trump and Clinton would have spent significantly more time speaking in “swing” metropolitan areas or centers. Trump’s proclamation that he may not vacate office upon defeat rings eerily authoritarian and in a sense, very predictable when very few believe in the election institutions set in place.
Recently, I’ve been musing on the idea that Western politics have become so polarized that we have lost our ability to have contest in areas of importance. The political realm, in the eyes of many thinkers, represents an arena from which people can derive genuine meaning. However, this can only be true if the presupposition that linear political progress is possible and actualized. Plato believed that political progress is circular, or again, maybe Rousseau was right that political progress was wholly misguided to begin with. Nevertheless, in the here and now, the American people have been sufficiently inspired that their filling in a square with a dull #2 pencil will lead to a linear political progress. It’s difficult to avoid cynicism when two parties dominate political discourse and complex political subjects often become reduced to binaries. Few recent moments capture this sentiment quite as clearly as the back and forth between Trump and Biden over child separation at the American southern border. “Who built the cages, Joe?” was one of the many soundbites from the final debate that drew national attention. The president of the current administration and the vice president of the preceding administration traded blows over which administration had their hand more strongly in the separation and caging of migrant children.
Political topics such as abortion and single-payer healthcare have been a part of the American political discourse for some time now. However, because the two-party system makes issues binary, it feels like we’ve substituted progress for a pair of scales. Whatever party holds the executive branch, the larger allotment of congressional seats, and to some extent, who was able to install ideologically similar federal justices will determine the legislation. We see this in Obama’s Affordable Care Act in 2010, and Trump’s avowal to remove it. If the ACA were to be dismantled by the US Supreme Court, as some predict, I firmly believe that Democrats would devote significant resources to create something in its likeness. Likewise, if the ACA withstands the assault, I find it unlikely that Republicans stop advocating against its unconstitutionality. The back and forth of the legislation, particularly on specific crucial issues, often seems to directly coincide with the party in power.
And to some extent, that is the nature of democratic politics; nevertheless, it seems to me that what American politics lacks is a true sense of political progress. Regardless of your position on the issue, the legal standing of Roe v. Wade continues to be a point of legal contention since its ruling in 1973; similarly, a decade has passed since Obamacare was first formed and yet the political mood surrounding it continues to swing depending on who holds the necessary seats. Is this not stagnancy rather than political progress? Rather than propelling a nation forward, and to some extent, uplifting the humanity of its citizenry, the state of American politics results in a growing division on these binary issues. Here, I appreciate Viktor Frankl’s observations on the subject in Man’s Search for Meaning, that “What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him.” American politics do not lack combativeness, or the ‘tension’ that Frankl describes; however, the tension is pitted internally rather than being projected forward into some common goal.
Some issues require extensive political debate, unlike, for example, the idea that climate change negatively impacts our lives and thus should be prevented. Although people and parties differ on solutions, the acceptance of a common aspiration allows for moving the point of contest forward. Imagine, for example, if we flipped a series of coins on several key issues and determined that we as a nation would wholeheartedly accept whatever outcomes the coins decide. If that were the case, we could at least share a common set of presuppositions, (for the hypothetical example: that we may not support single-payer healthcare but will maintain abortion rights). From there, one could hope that maybe our collective national gaze could turn from “which binary choice is correct?” to “how can we function within this decision’s parameters to better society as a whole?” If we believe that single-payer healthcare should not be under the purview of the state, how then could we reconcile the issue of unhealthy people requiring care another way? To me, it seems that by continuing to oscillate between legislative positions, the issues themselves never become solved. Or at the very least, the answers appear as longlasting as is their initiating party in power. This constant repositioning prevents genuine progress, the sort of progress that could lead to a healthier political discourse.
The Student Movement is the official student newspaper of Andrews University. Opinions expressed in the Student Movement are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the editors, Andrews University or the Seventh-day Adventist church.