This election season, the battle between the Democratic and Republican parties for the so-called “soul of the nation” seems fiercer than ever. Both candidates promise to reclaim and restore the country’s alleged former glory, and the onus is put upon voters to align themselves with whichever vision they agree with the most. Disenfranchisement and ballot interference aside, the American people will choose a victor – someone who will put forth policies that will impact generations of Americans to come. However, those who are able to vote will be participating in a process that ensures that their voices do not actually bring about any real change.
In a classic democratic model, citizens seeking change elect representatives who pass laws that cater to their constituents’ interests. In the modern day, corporate interests motivate nearly all legislation – from bills against terminating insurance premiums for healthcare and directing funding away from public transit in urban areas to the regulation of pharmaceutical drug prices and American foreign policy decisions in the Global South. To push legislation through, many corporations use political action committees (PACs), which are tax-exempt per Section 527 of the U.S. Internal Revenue Code and are thereby able to channel money to causes with little to no governmental friction. While labor unions and non-profit organizations have established political action committees as well to fund their causes, the vast majority of the approximately 4,600 active PACs in the United States today were established by businesses and serve corporate interests. Super PACs take this concept one step further by abolishing acceptance limits on donations.
It is for this reason, among others, that congestion pricing for personal vehicles in cities, the de-privatization of higher education and affordable medicine remain distant despite years of worker-driven campaigns in favor of them. Neither the Republican nor the Democratic Party possess the ability or desire to dismantle this hierarchical and capitalist system, because it is their lifeblood.
As a means of funding this system, what is now known as the United States was established upon the lands of several Indigenous tribes. All non-Indigenous people in the Americas are settlers, making all non-Indigenous governance illegitimate and imposed forcefully and violently upon pre-existing livelihoods. Non-Indigenous people in the U.S. may celebrate Indigenous People’s Day once a year, but they will never be able to fully understand and reckon with the fact that it is the very presence of settlers that has led to the disenfranchisement of the communities and ecosystems they occupy.
From the colonial place names we use to identify the Indigenous lands we occupy to the concepts we appropriate, anti-Indigenousness is deeply entrenched in the American ethos. Such anti-Indigenousness extends beyond the borders of the continental U.S., with American hegemony being the leading force in toppling democracies around the world, from Korea to Bolivia. It was, after all, an unwavering belief in “manifest destiny” and baseless American exceptionalism that pushed the United States to seize lands in the Caribbean and Asia-Pacific as military bases, among other travesties.
This November, regardless of the outcome, many things will not improve. Workers will still be exploited. Indigenous people will still be deprived of their land and Black Americans will still be deprived of their rights. Central American, Palestinian, Syrian and Tamil refugees will continue to be denied asylum. The United States will continue to orchestrate coups d’etat in the Korean peninsula, Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. The climate crisis will continue accelerating. No amount of voting for or against someone has stopped any of this from happening, and this year will be no different. The only way to fix America is to break the system – to break the Democratic and Republican parties alike.
