Politics & Society

None of the Above

Some young leftists suspect neither Clinton nor Obama can cure what ails us

  mem550@nyu.edu

Alex Cline, 19, is the sort of energetic young voter who could help the Democratic Party win the presidency. But he’s not a Democrat. In fact, if Hillary Clinton wins the nomination, he may go to the Democratic National Convention – but to protest.

Whether the fault lies with unpersuasive promises for change, too-close ties to the Washington establishment or insufficient urgency in plans to end the Iraq war, many young progressives are critical of a Democratic Party that has yet to earn their vote.

“They’re just the lesser of two evils,” Cline said, comparing Democrats to Republicans.

In a country of supposedly red and blue states, it’s easy to forget that other hues can influence voting, too. And despite record turnouts in the primaries– particularly among young Democrats – many left-leaning college students are unenthusiastic about either Clinton or Barack Obama.

Some, like Cline, have joined a revitalized Students for a Democratic Society, a progressive change organization especially influential in the late 1960s. In 2006, as Iraq war casualties climbed, a new generation revived SDS. The group says it aims “to remake a movement – a young left where our struggles can build and sustain a society of justice-making, solidarity, equality, peace and freedom.”

Is this déjà-vu? Before the 1968 elections, many on the left were likewise reluctant to support vice president Hubert Humphrey’s presidential bid, as he was seen as having supported escalation of the Vietnam War under President Lyndon Johnson. When Humphrey won the Democratic nomination, disillusioned protesters clashed with riot police on the streets of Chicago. Republican Richard Nixon (who later began the pullout) won the presidency.

“I’ve been jaded from working at a lot of mainstream Democratic activism venues,” said Alyssa Cundari, 21, a University of Miami student who was in New York this spring to attend a Young Democratic Socialists convention. “I don’t feel like there is a big enough difference between the parties.”

While annoyed that the Democrats hadn’t come up with alternative policies on immigration or the war, she was especially turned off by what she considers the party’s silence on issues of class and the economy.

“Democrats are a slightly more moderate right-wing party,” said Cline, a student at the New School in New York. “They are effectively forced to operate along the same lines as the Republican Party, and receive funding from big-business war profiteers, the same people giving Republicans money.”

Cline and Cundari both said they suspected the Democrats would never keep their promises to institute universal health care, with the health industry contributing so heavily to Democratic campaigns.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics in Washington, the Democrats had by the winter of 2008 received 51 percent of the roughly $9.1 million in campaign contributions donated by pharmaceutical companies, and 59 percent of the $3.9 million donated by HMOs.

“There is a movement among young liberal-minded students to push the Democratic Party to the left,” said New York University politics professor Lawrence Mead. He traces that to Howard Dean’s grassroots presidential campaign in 2004.

But James Miller, who chairs the New School’s liberal studies program, says SDS doesn’t look especially influential.

“I don’t think the new SDS is a strong enough force to pose much of a challenge to Democrats,” he said. “It is not at all like 1968: there is no important anti-war movement, and both Clinton and Obama say they will get out of Iraq. It is too soon to tell how meaningful the new new left, so to speak, will become: a lot depends on what happens in the fall elections, what happens in the economy — and of course what happens in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A new draft would change everything.”

Though both Obama and Clinton call for a gradual U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, neither has endorsed the immediate pullout many on the left demand.

“We need to start talking about the $3 trillion cost of the war, the 4,000 American troops dead, the two million Iraqis displaced, and the close to one million Iraqis killed because of this illegal occupation,” said Alex Lotorto, 21, a student at Muhlenburg College in Allentown, PA, during a protest outside Democratic National Committee headquarters on the fifth anniversary of the start of the war.

He watched as about 30 protesters – many of them college students – were arrested for blocking traffic. They were loaded into police wagons, the names of dead Americans and Iraqis visible on placards dangling from their necks.

“The Democrats are losing my vote,” Lotorto said. “We need to show them that we’re not ready to vote for them unless they win our votes back by being peace candidates.”

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