Jacques Marley

I didn't have any intention to comment on the midterms, American politics, or elections. I still try to exercise that restraint, having learned, through a long and painful process, how little room there is for my voice or for the insights I offer, at this time. I also have other priorities that deserve my attention. But returning to some foundational, US-focused literature on social capital and civic engagement has reminded me how much I have always cared and continue to care about American public life. And maybe there is a little sadness I continue to feel, like many other Americans, from everything that has happened in America. I remain excited about the possibility of a society in which we can engage across differences, tolerate disagreement, and allow our convictions to be challenged without treating every criticism or passionate conviction as betrayal from someone who thinks differently. I wish our political communities made more room for that, instead of expecting and demanding the kind of loyalty that makes accountability nearly impossible. And perhaps that is why I find American electoral politics so unbelievably and increasingly frustrating. Within this two-party system, we keep swinging like a pendulum, with each party’s failures becoming the other’s opportunity for rehabilitation. Every election becomes another argument about who is more dangerous, more cruel, more morally indefensible. The pressure to defeat one party becomes a reason to suspend accountability for the other. What happens to political memory in that process? What happens to the people whose lives were destroyed by policies we are now being asked to move past? In 2024, many of us asked why genocide was not a red line for liberal Democrats. We did not receive an adequate answer. We were given electoral miscalculations, warnings about “inflammatory” speech, lectures about the importance of “polite decorum,” and demands to be pragmatic, while thousands of children were being mercilessly slaughtered with weapons paid for by our tax dollars. The question was about the Palestinian fundamental human right to life, and about what obligations follow when the party you support helps sustain the conditions of mass death. A change in who holds power does not settle that question. Nor does it erase the decisions Democrats made when they held power themselves. It saddens me to think that the Democratic Party’s reputation can recover after 2024 just because Republicans offer a more openly brutal expression of American power. Where does that leave accountability for Gaza? What becomes of the choices Democratic leaders made, the support they continued to provide, and the leverage they could have used? Palestinian lives, and the lives of all indigenous and oppressed people, cannot matter only when defending them is compatible with opposing the party in office. We have reason to worry about the role progressive figures such as El-Sayed and Mamdani can play in this rehabilitation of the Democratic Party, even when their own convictions and policy preferences diverge from those of the party’s leadership. People think that Obama was helping El-Sayed when campaigning for him. That may be true. But in the long-run, it was El-Sayed that was helping Obama, in the attempt to control the narrative of his legacy. The "cool handshake" between Obama and El-Sayed on the campaign trail, between a black and brown man, demonstrates a legacy of tokenistic and performative representation. I really hope that people caught that. The Progressive presence can give people reasons to hope. But that hope can also restore legitimacy to a party whose senior leaders should be investigated and prosecuted for complicity in genocide at the Hague. Admiration for individual progressives in the Democratic Party cannot resolve that larger question. I noted this concern in an earlier post... but are we honestly going to absorb Gaza into the same political amnesia that has allowed those responsible for Iraq to retain their authority, reputation, and respectability? How many times can the demands for accountability be deferred by liberal Americans that should care about democracy until they just disappear? Isn't accountability a necessary component for a sustainable democracy? I have reflected a great deal on what it means to remain civically engaged when the available political choices leave you so utterly confused, dismayed, disempowered, and even feeling disenfranchised or marginalized when both parties don't represent your views. I have been concerned about the erosion of tolerance and civil discourse, as I know many others have. I have also experienced it firsthand, sharing my views with perhaps too much faith that legal protections for freedom of expression, speech, and political orientation would be reflected in a willingness to hear different opinions, especially in academic and policy spaces... all the while watching people leave my life simply because they disagree with me. I am shaking my head as I write this, reflecting on the past ten years, because it still boggles my mind that people who value intellectual inquiry can have so little capacity to tolerate disagreement, let alone appreciate what they might learn from it. Yet I am reminded that there is much in the literature on social capital that can help explain this tendency in America and offer some perspective on why we shouldn't take it personally, even when it's all personal. We should be able to disagree, organize, persuade, and work together. But that requires room to challenge our own political communities, including when doing so is inconvenient for an election. It requires taking people’s moral objections seriously and not treating them as failures of political sophistication. My attention may be on global politics, but I am also an American, born and raised in Wisconsin, what I like to call the heart of America. I am also someone who has studied American government in advanced levels and participated in the political process. And now I am designing an American government course that I hope I have the opportunity to teach one day. As a public policy scholar, I am allowed to hold and express my political opinions without being subjected to social or professional repercussions for exercising my freedom of expression. As an American, I also believe I have a responsibility to question what is done with our public resources and in our name, both here in the United States and around the world. The people affected by American power often have no vote in our elections, yet they live with consequences that extend far beyond our electoral cycles. It is important to reflect on what our claims about democracy mean to people whose suffering we continue to overlook. As Americans, we have every right to expect more from our political life, even when our convictions do not fit neatly within the political system. We should be able to demand accountability from those we elect without being told that our moral convictions are an electoral inconvenience. Our civic life should also make more room for the voices of those who have had to endure the consequences of our policy decisions. And when the next election comes around, we should remember what we owe them, instead of allowing electoral politics to absolve us of our complicity... Thanks for reading this post.