TO THE EDITOR:

Like most other establishment institutions, THE HOYA’s editorial board seems eager to impress the necessity of essentially legitimizing the status quo in its demand that college students do their “duty” by voting for one of the two tickets that will emerge from the 2008 presidential campaigns (“Don’t Put Off Your Vote,” THE HOYA, Jan. 11, 2008, A2). The editorial board rather dogmatically assumes that, within the realm of politics, “whatever excites you” must be the candidacy of McCain, Obama, Clinton, Huckabee or Ron Paul. It further claims that the “choice” that college students face is “a pretty simple one”: students can continue with their apathy and solipsism in claiming either that voting isn’t worth it or that none of the candidates appeal to them, or they can “finally stand up and end politics as usual.” After all, we are told, “Democracy won’t work if people don’t vote.”

THE HOYA here valorizes a rather bizarre, though certainly dominant, conception of democracy. It calls what is rather clearly an elective aristocracy — that is, a system of representation dominated by the wealthy and powerful and directed by those who, subordinated to such vested interests, claim they can adequately promote our interests — a “democratic system of government.” It stresses our “duty” to consent to a “democracy” in which the top 20 percent of households hold over 80 percent of privately held wealth and over 90 percent of financial wealth. The editors have nothing to say about the world’s multitude — from Iraq to Afghanistan, Palestine to Sierra Leone — who have no voice in this “democracy,” despite the varying degree to which American hegemony impacts the lives of these individuals.

Voting for Obama or McCain, as THE HOYA’s editorial board would have us do, will not help end “politics as usual.” Rather, we must resist the alienation that leads us either to withdraw to our private existences, forget the outside world or believe in the legitimacy of politicians. We must reclaim true democracy: the contestation of and struggle against domination and oligarchic power in both state and society.

Javier Sethness (SFS ’07)
Jan. 12, 2008