By Victoria Mejicanos, Nov. 19, 2024
It’s no secret this election cycle has been exhausting in each party. It has been called the most consequential election in recent history on both sides of the aisle. People have spent an endless amount of time, effort and even money to show why their candidate is the right one. Politics has become so personal to the point it feels as if people are trying to prove their way of life is the correct one.
The truth is, there is no right choice. Both the Democratic and Republican parties have done damaging things to the country, and both parties have left Americans feeling disappointed.
Americans are trying to work with a system that never fully considered many of them in the first place. At the time of the writing of The Declaration of Independence where the phrase “all men are created equal” appears, only white men who owned property were treated with respect. According to The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History,the initial draft of the Constitution often protected slavery. Also according to The Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, about 25 of the 55 delegates of the Constitutional Convention owned slaves. It is an imperfect document.
The future people wanted in the 1700s didn’t include the average American today. Today, America is filled with a variety of people, experiences and cultures that the people who wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution would never have imagined, which is why there needs to be radical change in our political system.
Political extremism and moving away from centrism has caused immense political polarization and dissatisfaction to rise at alarming rates. Democrats and Republicans don’t even seem to agree on what are actual problems in America. There are two versions of America in people’s minds, but either way, people are dissatisfied. If Americans saw that commonality, we’d be better off as a country.
People seem to already be concerned about the results of the current election, despite President-elect Donald Trump winning the popular vote. In the first week postelection, Google searches like “can I change my vote” and “what are tariffs” rose in popularity.
No matter the party, many politicians in the federal government truly don’t act in the best interest of the people they are meant to serve. They’re selfish.
A majority of the members in Congress were millionaires in 2020. Additionally, both parties have ties to major corporations, or more specifically, billionaires. It’s simple to see who contributed to both campaigns. There is no good celebrity, and there is no good billionaire. Just because Elon Musk is close to Trump and has been given a government position doesn’t mean Vice President Kamala Harris didn’t have other billionaires donating to her campaign. Bill Gates, who is just as controversial as Musk, has been a large supporter of Harris. In fact, Harris had more billionaire supporters than Donald Trump this election cycle.
The constant pandering to cooperate for self-interest is not a new phenomenon in politics. The entire Bush family has ties to oil companies and still owns them, according to Forbes.
According to Forbes, “Like his father, George W. Bush had ties to the oil industry. Even Bush’s vice president, Dick Cheney, was an ex-oilman, having served as the CEO of the oilfield services company Halliburton. Within two weeks of taking office, Bush named Cheney as the chairman of the National Energy Policy Development Group.”
The purpose of this new group, according to Forbes, was to “develop a national energy policy designed to help the private sector, and, as necessary and appropriate, state and local governments promote dependable, affordable and environmentally sound production and distribution of energy for the future.”
According to the same article, the Bush administration passed several laws aimed at accelerating the development of fracking. This is a fact. The Bush family knew they were going to profit from these policies and didn’t care about actively harming the environment in the long term. Even worse, the Environmental Protection Agency let them get away with it.
Politics has proven itself to behave as a cruel game, and the American people are the ones being played. The two-party system has shown this “race” has no winners.
Just because Americans are not winning now, it doesn’t mean they never have, and it doesn’t mean they never will. The reason America exists is because people were dissatisfied with their government and decided to do something about it. Radical change takes time, but agreeing a change is needed is the first step. An obstacle Americans of the past didn’t have in their way were algorithms that keep people stuck in echo chambers, which drives the political divide even further.
People need to take advantage of technology instead of allowing it to divide them into right and wrong. Sweden is one of the most politically satisfied countries in the world. Their political system and country as a whole are drastically different than the U.S. There are 8 political parties that could possibly represent the country. The last time one party got absolute majority was in 1968 according to the country’s official website. There is also nothing like the Electoral College in Sweden. Also according to the countries website, Sweden uses a proportional representation system for its parliamentary elections, which ensures that political parties receive seats in the legislature in proportion to the share of the vote they receive. Because the citizens of Sweden trust their government, there is a high voter turnout. It has not dipped below 80 percent since the 1950s, demonstrating their government is truly representative of its people.
Organization and collective action (many people working together toward a common goal) is the true pathway to power. Trump developed his support from voters by mobilizing them with his rhetoric. Millions of people got off their phones, off the couch and walked to the nearest voting booth to make a decision they thought was in their best interest. Trump has always had support, but by 2024, his following has increased across nearly every demographic. The power of simple organization and speaking to communities in a way they can understand and makes them feel seen is highly underestimated. It’s time that ends.
The Civil Rights Movement is the most obvious display of collective action in recent history. It has solidified the rights of many Americans. There were several key groups and leaders of this movement who each made efforts simultaneously. It took years of sit-ins, marches, protests, boycotts and, unfortunately, even death to live in the America we do today.
People took it upon themselves to stop relying on the government and turn to each other for mutual aid and advocacy to create a more equitable life for themselves. This is the same for arguably every other movement in the United States. There is a playbook for change. The path to change lies in our past. We just need to finally decide to acknowledge it. The power has always been in the people, not the institutions that claim to represent them.
Feature image by Katelyn Chow
