The US presidential debates' illusion of political choice
The issue is not what separates Romney and Obama, but how much they agree. This hidden consensus has to be exposed
by Glenn Greenwald
The Guardian (U.K.)
10/4/12
Wednesday night's
debate
between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney underscored a core truth about
America's presidential election season: the vast majority of the most
consequential policy questions are completely excluded from the process.
This fact is squarely at odds with a primary claim made about the two
parties – that they represent radically different political philosophies
– and illustrates how narrow the range of acceptable mainstream
political debate is in the country.
In part this is because
presidential elections are now conducted almost entirely like a tawdry
TV reality show. Personality quirks and trivialities about the
candidates dominate coverage, and voter choices, leaving little room for
substantive debates.
But in larger part, this exclusion is due to
the fact that, despite frequent complaints that America is plagued by a
lack of bipartisanship, the two major party candidates are in
full-scale agreement on many of the nation's most pressing political
issues. As a result these are virtually ignored, drowned out by a
handful of disputes that the parties relentlessly exploit to galvanise
their support base and heighten fear of the other side.
Most of
what matters in American political life is nowhere to be found in its
national election debates. Penal policies vividly illustrate this point.
America imprisons more of its citizens than any other nation on earth
by far, including countries with far greater populations. As the
New
York Times reported in April 2008: "The United States has less than 5%
of the world's population.
But it has almost a quarter of the world's prisoners."
Even
worse, these policies are applied, and arguably designed, with mass
racial disparities. One in every four African-American men is likely to
be imprisoned. Black and Latino drug users are arrested, prosecuted and
imprisoned at far higher rates than whites, even though usage among all
groups is relatively equal.
The human cost of this sprawling penal
state is obviously horrific: families are broken up, communities are
decimated, and those jailed are rendered all but unemployable upon
release. But the financial costs are just as devastating. California now
spends more on its prison system than it does on higher education, a
warped trend repeated around the country.
Yet none of these issues
will even be mentioned, let alone debated, by Mitt Romney and Barack
Obama. That is because they have no discernible differences when it
comes to any of the underlying policies, including America's relentless
fixation on treating drug usage as a criminal, rather than health,
problem. The oppressive system that now imprisons 1.8 million Americans,
and that will imprison millions more over their lifetime, is therefore
completely ignored during the only process when most Americans are
politically engaged.
This same dynamic repeats itself in other crucial realms. President Obama's dramatically escalated
drone attacks
in numerous countries have generated massive anger in the Muslim world,
continuously kill civilians, and are of dubious legality at best. His
claimed right to target even American citizens for extrajudicial
assassinations, without a whiff of transparency or oversight, is as
radical a power as any seized by George Bush and Dick Cheney.
Yet
Americans whose political perceptions are shaped by attentiveness to the
presidential campaign would hardly know that such radical and
consequential policies even exist. That is because here too there is
absolute consensus between the two parties.
A long list of highly
debatable and profoundly significant policies will be similarly excluded
due to bipartisan agreement. The list includes a rapidly growing
domestic surveillance state that now monitors and records even the most
innocuous activities of all Americans; job-killing free trade
agreements; climate change policies; and the Obama justice department's
refusal to prosecute the Wall Street criminals who precipitated the 2008
financial crisis.
On still other vital issues, such as America's
steadfastly loyal support for Israel and its belligerence towards Iran,
the two candidates will do little other than compete over who is most
aggressively embracing the same absolutist position. And this is all
independent of the fact that even on the issues that are the subject of
debate attention, such as healthcare policy and entitlement "reform",
all but the most centrist positions are off limits.
The harm from
this process is not merely the loss of what could be a valuable
opportunity to engage in a real national debate. Worse, it is
propagandistic: by emphasising the few issues on which there is real
disagreement between the parties, the election process ends up
sustaining the appearance that there is far more difference between the
two parties, and far more choice for citizens, than is really offered by
America's political system.
One way to solve this problem would
be to allow credible third-party candidates into the presidential
debates and to give them more media coverage. Doing so would highlight
just how similar Democrats and Republicans have become, and what little
choice American voters actually have on many of the most consequential
policies. That is exactly why the two major parties work so feverishly
to ensure the exclusion of those candidates: it is precisely the
deceitful perception of real choice that they are most eager to
maintain.