The U.S. deserves a more progressive political party than the Democratic party. As the U.S. has aged, its political paradigm has shifted evermore left. The country was thought to be progressive at different historical junctions, but this is because of relativity.
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” by Harriet Beecher Stowe has high acclaim from liberals who claim it was the driving force which caused the Civil War. It is often claimed Abraham Lincoln greeted Stowe saying, “So this is the little lady who started this great war.”
Novelist and social critic James Baldwin expresses his dismay about Stowe, “But this, let us say, was beyond Mrs. Stowe’s powers; she was not so much a novelist as an impassioned pamphleteer.” Baldwin criticized her idea of black Americans fighting slavery through Uncle Tom’s character, writing, “the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart.“
It is here where a Democrat might argue Baldwin is overlooking the historical impact of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” What the American liberal does not question is whether any justice was brought by the war at all, as the slavery industry transformed into indentured servitude and then to free prison labor. The Republican party often claims to be “the party of Lincoln,” often attempting to salvage its morality after accusations of racism.
What both parties fail to understand is Lincoln should not be a paragon for racial morality. In The Great Debates of 1858, Lincoln stated, “I will say then, that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters of the Negroes, or jurors or qualifying them to hold office, of having them to marry with white people.” Lincoln adds, “There must be the position of superior and inferior, that I as much as any other man am in favor of the superior position being assigned to the white man.”
The contingencies many progressives have regarding America’s concept of liberalism is far from outdated. In 2016, Hillary Clinton sided avidly against “broken windows” policing, opposing her rival Donald Trump. Maybe voters would have aligned more fervently with her if she didn’t seem so disingenuous, as Hillary and her husband advocated tenaciously for “broken windows” policing in the 1990s.
It is an ignoble insult to the American voters’ intelligence when white liberals forget the praise writers of these policies received in previous decades. When these naive champions of racist policy were faced with the negative consequences their ideals created, they simply dodged any veracious answer which would make them appear incompetent.
Malcolm Gladwell, one of these acclaimed authors, disregarded the effects of stop-and-frisk, saying, “The New York Police Department has done a better job than any other police department in history.” He then states, “They have done that by empowering their police force, and occasionally that empowerment has resulted in stop-and-frisk, in profiling of young black men. The same neighborhoods who have suffered through that kind of excessive and in some ways unfair scrutiny from the police, have seen their crime rates drop through the floor.”
Statistics show crime rates are continuing to drop after stop-and-frisk was repealed in 2013, proving revoking the rights from entire groups of people is not the solution. American liberals must ask themselves whether they are helping the people whose wars they are fighting.
We observe this phenomenon among Democratic imperialists. While former president Barack Obama was highly critical of his previous administration’s foreign policy, he did not complete his promise of reduced foreign intervention. Under the Obama administration, the U.S. drone program conducted 10 times more drone strikes than the Bush administration. Thousands of innocent civilians, many of whom were children, lost their lives.
In the wake of the Parkland shooting, many Democrats have criticized Republicans for receiving money from the National Rifle Association. Democratic representative Adam Schiff has been one of the most vocal critics. Even though he does not receive donations from the NRA, Schiff receives funding from Northop Grumman, Raytheon and Orbital ATK, all companies which mass produce weapons globally.
Activist Howard Zinn wrote, “The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don’t listen to it, you will never know what justice is.” The Democratic party has created an illusion that they are willing to listen to the poor, whose voices are so faint in comparison to the wealthy.
However cliché the old adage is, the notion that actions speak louder than words still applies. The American people are exhausted from voting for the lesser of two evils. It is disheartening that the nature of a two-party system has created an atmosphere for decisions based on utilitarianism. Americans deserve a party more exuberantly progressive than the current Democrats.
Soheil Saneei is a biological engineering freshman from Metairie, Louisiana.
