Last week, Andrew Goodman-Bacon wrote, “If Macalester students, all very powerful and smart people in the grand scheme of things, cannot step back and add constructively to the legislative process, who can?” And this is exactly the point: we’re actually the only kind of people who participate in the legislative process, and that’s the problem. Our political system makes it virtually impossible for anybody who isn’t us—you know, powerful and smart, or maybe just rich and white—to have any say in the governing of the country. Quite frankly, Macalester students (myself included) are just about the last people I want to see running this country.

Goodman-Bacon’s example of the supposed success of welfare reform is a terrific example of the way the United States is run. Even barring any discussion of what a good idea it turned out to be—and I think that’s disputable, at best—implicit in all of the rhetoric is the incredibly paternalistic idea that people on welfare need to be prodded along, or guided, or whatever; that giving them money to, say, feed their kids needs to be contingent on a whole host of requirements.

The compromise regarding welfare reform was made by rich Republicans and rich Democrats, and as usual, the poor were left by the wayside, only to be later held up for occasional derision (by liberals and conservatives alike) because of the effects of that reform. As usual, the problem is not either side of the debate so much as it is the terms of the debate in the very broadest sense because American-style capitalism on a global scale inherently creates a hierarchy in which a few at the top—that’s where we are, if you’re keeping track—make all the decisions for the billions at the bottom.

We are able to have civil discussions about any number of things—say, foreign policy—because we are always on the end of the socio-economic spectrum that reaps the rewards and doesn’t experience any of the costs, like being blown up or slowly starving to death. I fail to see what would be tangibly different in a new president—imperialism to this country is as American as processed cheese. The United States has been pursuing imperialist policies virtually since its inception, and there’s no reason to believe that now, 228 years into the project, we’d decide that we’ve had enough.

The tragedy is that there should be enough of us to do something about all this that we abhor so much, but liberals refuse to agree to anything that might affect their status in any way, that might force them to compromise their own lifestyles. Here’s an example: at the recent FTAA protests in Miami, there were about 10,000 people (mostly union members) marching around the city, compared to about 1,000 people (maybe fewer), including the Macalester kids who went down, who were actually trying to take down the fence and stop the meeting. They had the numbers, but not the will, preferring to engage instead in an entirely symbolic (and entirely ineffective) protest. We had the will but not the numbers. If the people marching around had actually wanted to stop the meetings and delay the FTAA, they could have; instead, they wouldn’t, and got beaten by the cops anyways.

The situation was an archetype for the liberal problem: if everybody vehemently opposing Bush would stop putting so much faith in entirely cosmetic and superficial solutions and instead try to throw a wrench in the system that elects only rich white people pursuing rich white people‘s goals, some kind of actual change could really happen. Until then, we are simply manicuring the branches, when we should be trying to pull the tree out at the roots.