The most striking part of Wednesday’s debate between Syracuse University’s College Democrats and College Republicans — a debate that’s been a long time coming — wasn’t what was said. It was what was left unsaid.

The groups broke the debate into discussions about immigration, gun control, health care and women’s rights. Yet there was no discussion of these issues in relation to Syracuse or New York state. More damningly, there was no discussion of why any of the issues are problematic in the first place.

American philosopher Noam Chomsky has a quote applicable both to this debate and to the debates we see between the larger Democrat and Republican parties: “The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum…”

Republicans and Democrats are two wings of a bureaucracy that defines political issues and never solves them. Rather, each side proposes a solution to manage an issue and proceeds to compete with the other party based on their management styles instead of attempting to solve the problem or change the system.

And because Democrats and Republicans define issues and solutions according to the values ascribed to their parties, they are never wrong. They set the terms, and the issues are never solved because both sides are more or less comfortable with the system as it stands.

That complacency was evident in Wednesday’s debate. Neither the College Democrats or the College Republicans tried to answer one essential question: “Why is society the way it is?”

And because both parties agree with global capitalism, there is no way to answer that question. I do want to give credit to one of the Republicans in the debate, who, while discussing Obamacare, continued to ask the Democrats why health care costs so much in the first place. Instead of answering his question, the Democrats would ask why he wasn’t willing to pay for someone else’s health care.

What is happening here is that both parties are critiquing distinct parts of the system — ideologically, if not in practice. If you add their critiques together it starts to make sense. The Democrats see that capitalism is corrupt and want the government to regulate it. The Republicans see that the government is corrupt and want the market to regulate itself.

Is it possible that — gasp! — both are corrupt? So long as society is unequal, the powerful rise to the top, the wealthy use their money to influence policy and the politicians use policy to control who has money. This isn’t hard to grasp.

In order to tackle these issues, you need a systemic understanding of why issues exist in the first place. Anarchism offers one such understanding. It maintains that we should not be beholden to the cruelty of the market or bureaucratic politicians. And Democrats and Republicans should both be able to agree with at least half of that.

Sam Norton is a senior advertising and psychology dual major. His column appears biweekly. He can be reached at sanorton@syr.edu.

Published on November 30, 2017 at 1:23 am