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BY GARTH SHELDON-COULSON

In print | Published November 11, 2004

The problem with Swatties is that we act too much like Democrats.

I’m not talking about our liberal values or our priorities for the country. As far as those go, Swatties and the Democratic Party have got it right. What I am talking about is a concept with which George W. Bush seems especially familiar, as he revealed by pronouncing it correctly last week. I’m talking about political capital.

Roughly speaking, the prototypical Swarthmore student and the prototypical Democrat have the same set of ideals. They both think it’s the responsibility of the fortunate and the powerful to fix societal structures that bear people into inopportune circumstances and to help those already stuck there.

But the Democrats, for whatever reason, just can’t seem to take the reins of power for long enough to make good on those good intentions. Theirs has been a 40-year downward spiral, punctuated only briefly by the Carter and Clinton years. The political capital simply has not been there — and after last week, things are not looking up.

As good liberals, we like to attribute the Democrats’ recent failures to the deception machinery of the Republican Party or the brute stupidity of 51-plus percent of the American population. But whom we lash out at is beside the point. The point is that to make a difference in the country, the Democrats desperately need to be in power.

At the political science department’s “What Now?” panel last week, professor Cynthia Halpern suggested that a new left wing is the way to move the liberal agenda — an analogue, she said, to the civil rights movement. Working within the political system alone, she suggested, is futile.

Well, guess what, Professor? There’s no impetus for anything on that scale — not now, not for a while. Wronged and disenfranchised as they are, homosexuals and potential abortion-seekers are not going to rally around a modern-day Martin Luther King anytime soon, and not only because they don’t constitute the visible and embittered ten percent of the country’s population that blacks did. As for the poor and poorly educated, yhr Republican machinery is playing them like a fiddle.

These days, you see, the political landscape is different than it was 40 years ago. These days, the system holds all the cards, and so, therefore does the party in power.

Which brings me to Swatties. Swatties have always tended to work outside the system. Anti-slavery activists and women’s rights activists were among our founders, and their change-the-world method of choice has never left the Swat psyche.

But while it retains its romanticism, has activism lost its potency? By launching into the non-profit world instead of pursuing political or corporate influence, are Swatties confining themselves to the same irrelevancy as the Democratic Party?

Think of the ten decisions you consider most influential in terms of the social justice or injustice they have conferred on the country. Then find out who made those decisions, and go read their résumés. Are these the résumés of activists? Or are they the résumés of people who recognized that being in the position to make those decisions required climbing ladders not quite as romantic as perhaps they might have liked — corporate, legal and governmental?

Activism has an opportunity cost: the development of our own kind of political capital. In the wake of Bush’s re-election there are some things — tax cuts and Social Security reform, for instance — over which no liberal will be able to have an impact. As students still in the midst of developing our own political capital, it may not be worth the opportunity cost to try.

Of course, there are some institutions — the Supreme Court and the education system come to mind — that will have snowballing repercussions through all of society if befouled. Of activist causes, it is these we are truly obliged to try to protect.

But there is a balance to be struck. If the Democratic Party’s predicament is any example of a position one does not want to be in, we need to get real. Activism might be romantic and enticing, but the Republican Party is too smart to let it have any real effect. Idealism is better served by developing our own political capital now than by nursing impotence later.

Garth Sheldon-Coulson is a sophomore. You can reach him at gsheldon1@swarthmore.edu.

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