Harvard Pols Need Vision

It seems that hardly a day goes by that there is not an editorial or a screaming poster in the Yard that decries Harvard students' evident apathy towards political affairs. To a certain extent, the problem of apathy is overstated. An impressive 700 students showed up to the Phillips Brooks House rally to support the public service organization in its fight with the administration over an ultimately esoteric question of control.

Nevertheless, at a time when the political debate that confronts us is of the fundamental nature of what kind of government Americans want, Harvard students seem, by a certain measure, to be concerned with little more than upcoming finals and papers. Only a small segment of Harvard students are involved with the campus political organizations. Harvard-Radcliffe College Democrats and the two College Republican Clubs both draw an all-too-small fraction of undergraduates to their meetings and activities.

Yet sit in any dining hall long enough and you will hear students start to talk about the political issues of the day. The dichotomy is striking: Harvard students aren't apathetic about politics, they're apathetic about campus political organizations.

The campus political clubs give students every reason to pass them by and retreat from political involvement. Instead of finding ways to unite, the dueling Harvard Republican Club and Harvard Republican Alliance have been moving further and further away from one another. The two clubs have been engaging in a vicious and personal e-mail war.

This type of activity represents everything that people find distasteful and seedy about political life. This type of bickering over minutiae only hurts both groups. Of course, I can understand why the two clubs spend so much time weighing in on each other, seeing as neither has the program to meet the needs of America in the next century.

One would think that the Harvard Democrats would take advantage of the confusion on the right and work to attract disaffected moderates from the Republican ranks. However, College Democrats have been doing the exact opposite. Harvard's proud Democratic tradition includes the intellectual foundations of the New Deal and New Frontier, giving America luminaries and presidents from Franklin Delano Roosevelt '04 to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. '38. Today, however, Harvard Democrats are intellectually moribund. As U.S. News and World Report wrote in November, "At Harvard--long the cradle of liberal ideas and leaders--young Republicans outnumber Democrats 3 to 1."

The real reason that Harvard students are apathetic about politics is the same reason why so few Americans vote: people are tired of choices that offers no real choice and an electoral process built on voting against people instead of for them. Our campaigns are about why we should be against Republicans, against immigrants, against corporations, against minorities. Few in politics offer compelling reasons to vote for real solutions to our problems.

A couple of months ago, the Independent asked the Presidents of the Democratic and Republican clubs to write pieces on why their party should be supported by Harvard students. In his piece, then-College Democrats President Derek Ho '96 rightly lambasted Congressional Republicans for their actions in the past year. Yet, he could seemingly muster up only a couple of sentences on why President Bill Clinton was deserving of student support.

This weekend, College Democrats plan to go up to New Hampshire to canvas for the President's renomination. Hopefully, when they stand in the doorway of New Hampshire voters they will offer a more compelling reason to vote for Bill Clinton than the fact that he has his finger in the dike holding back the Republican flood. History has shown that elections are won by the party that shapes the intellectual debate. But Harvard Democrats have been AWOL from any real campus discussion of issues and ideas.

Even Ho has publicly acknowledged that political activity and debate at Harvard is dominated by "single issue activism." Yet new Dems President Seth D. Hanlon '98 campaigned on a promise to foster closer ties to the ethnic and minority groups on campus. He said that these organizations must know that "the Democratic Party speaks for them." The Democratic Party must continue to speak for the dispossessed in our society. But it already does. Here on campus it is the vast middle that feels it has no voice and no one "to speak for them."

Upon his election as president, Hanlon crowed that he "had liberalism in my blood." At a time when the modern incarnation of liberalism has been discredited time and time again, Hanlon should stop bragging about his bloodstream and give serious thought to an inoculation against this scourge of the Democratic Party.

For all of the Harvard College Democrats bluster about "liberalism," their agenda is essentially a defense of the status quo. There is a name for someone with this type of outlook. It's called a "conservative." Harvard Democrats should adopt a true progressive agenda that speaks to the real concerns of our generation, not a mere echo of what the politicians in Washington's "line of the day" is.

Harvard Democrats should eschew a knee-jerk defense of unpopular programs and instead focus on real solutions. Instead of spending their energy protesting cuts in welfare, Harvard Democrats should talk about how to finally end the pervasive cycle of poverty. Rather than fight Republican cuts in student loans, Harvard Democrats show propose ideas to throw open the doors to college to all those kept out because of escalating tuition costs. Franklin D. Roosevelt '04 said that it should be "the task of our Party to break with foolish traditions." Harvard Democrats should lead the way in this process, not bring up the rear.

Instead of discussing the solutions of the future, campus Democrats have spent their energy protecting the programs of the past. If Harvard Democrats think that America and Americans are doing just fine, then they are right to single-mindedly protest Republican tampering with perfection. Yet we all know America is in dire need of new ideas--and Harvard Democrats need to speak out with their vision of the future.