Commentary: Amid the euphoria of Chicago's World Series victory last week, one comment I heard repeated over and again was that this jubilation - when even rock-ribbed New Yorkers could give it up for the Cubs for a minute (maybe not a full 60 seconds, but at least a New York minute) - was something the country needed. Is it not striking that this exuberance is not something we associate with our elections? In a country that celebrates "democracy" and presumes to be its spokesman, we seem to regard the business of choosing national leaders as sordid even in milder years. In 2016, the bar has hit the ground and sunk into a deep pit. When will this be over?
As sure as Christmas morning, the day approaches. The bog of contentious primaries, alternative parties that won more attention than usual only to stumble, and a general election that elevated amateurish twaddle to the dais of national politics, will finally conclude. It would be unwise to make predictions about the outcome. However, we can safely project that our next President will not be the amusing Libertarian who was dumbfounded when asked about Syria and whose response to climate change was to propose colonizing another planet; and it will not be the most prominent leftist alternative to the Democrats, Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who has flailed miserably on foreign policy from her disastrous interview with the Washington Post editorial board to her incoherent pro-Assad stance on Syria to tweeting strange conspiracy theories about a fictitious Qatari pipeline.
It is the view of this column that we need credible alternatives to the dominant traditional parties, the Republicans and Democrats, at the very least for a substantive debate that critiques the established order. We must underline "credible," however. This is no joke: we need a serious and critical debate about American foreign policy, connecting the dots between endless wars and global capital. It is fine to argue that you want to enhance focus on domestic reform, but even this has implications for foreign policy. A candidate for President must communicate a coherent view of the world and a horizon toward which they would steer the institutional and military powers of the executive branch. Alternative candidates especially need a foreign policy vision that departs from the status quo yet is plausible to voters and potential endorsers.
The Republicans gave us Donald Trump, whose pronouncements on foreign policy have been, to put it politely, fanciful. In one of his few prepared speeches, billed as a major address on foreign policy, Trump claimed within the same speech that America needed to be more consistent in our foreign policy, but that we also needed to be "more unpredictable." We need to show our allies that we are dependable, but we should also break away from multilateral agreements and reconsider NATO.
That leaves Democrat Hillary Clinton, who has a very long record on foreign policy from her years in the United States Senate and as Secretary of State. Ironically, the most experienced foreign policy candidate ever to seek the office, at no point was required to defend rigorously her record or ideology on foreign policy, her advocacy of military and diplomatic interventions, or American promotion of neoliberalism (the resurgence of laissez-faire capitalist ideology on a global scale). She did not have to, due to a lack of substantive competition and a media that focused on bogus scandals instead.
In 2016, this beacon of democracy raised a middle finger to anyone craving serious discourse and a meaningful choice.
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Algernon D'Ammassa writes the Desert Sage column for the Deming Headlight and Sun News papers. Write to him at DesertSageMail@gmail.com.