The Simpsons knows. The Simpsons always knows.
The fact that the show predicted the tenure of President Trump (and the mess he’d leave in the White House) has been widely remarked upon, but the show’s most biting observation on US politics comes in the 1996 episode Treehouse of Horror VII. Like all the show’s Halloween episodes, Treehouse of Horror VII is a series of vignettes, one of which addresses the 1996 Presidential election. As the election unfolds, it’s revealed that both candidates have been abducted in secret and replaced by the hideous tentacled aliens Kang and Kodos.
The deception is eventually discovered — but as their true forms are exposed, the aliens basically shrug and laugh:
Kodos: It’s true! We are aliens. But what are you going to do about it? It’s a two-party system; you have to vote for one of us.
Man in crowd: Well, I believe I’ll vote for a third-party candidate.
Kang: Go ahead! Throw your vote away!
It might seem frivolous to quote The Simpsons in a column about the ongoing crisis in Israel and Palestine, but these three pithy lines are one of the most concise dissections of a fundamental problem with US politics: the two-party system, and specifically its implications for the executive branch. This analysis is just as pertinent in 2023 as it was in 1996 — arguably more so, given the brutal way in which the limitations of the two-party system have been laid bare since Hamas’ attack on Israel in early October.
Earlier this month, the Huffington Post’s Akbar Shahid Ahmed reported on the way the Biden administration has sidelined the US State Department on the issue — in both its response to the attacks themselves and to the resultant bombardment Israel continues to inflict on Gaza. “Many diplomats are alarmed by Washington’s largely unrestricted approval of Israel’s conduct in the war against Hamas,” Ahmed wrote, describing a meeting on October 26 wherein “leaders [of the State Department] said they were unsure if … they were having any impact [on] US policy.”
It’s not just diplomats who are concerned with the carte blanche the Biden administration is giving Israel: there is also growing dissent within the White House, and polling has shown consistently that the majority of Americans support a ceasefire in Gaza. In polling results published on 15 November, Reuters found that 68% of Americans agree with the statement “Israel should call a ceasefire and try to negotiate”; other polls have returned similar results.
Biden, however, doesn’t seem to care. In an interview with the excellent podcast American Prestige, Ahmed provides an insight into why this might be: “[Biden] believes himself to be a Middle East expert … He has a long relationship with Israel. He speaks often of meeting Golda Meir … [and] there is a really visceral and emotional response to October 7. The testimonies resonate with, especially, the top people, [who are being] driven by an emotional reaction.” Whether Biden’s view of himself is justified is, um, open to question — as Ahmed also notes, “This is the man who famously suggested the partition of Iraq along ethnic lines”. But regardless, this sort of unilateral, emotional decision-making is reminiscent of Biden’s predecessor — which is not a good look.
A couple of disclaimers: the president is elected to govern, not to read opinion polls, and in any case, he’s not the only one involved here. Congress also plays a role, and its very nature means that there’ll be a diversity of views — albeit not an especially broad one when it comes to Gaza — on any given issue. But the president is the face of the USA, especially on foreign policy. Individual members of Congress can call for a ceasefire until they’re blue in the face, but if that call isn’t coming from the White House, it’s unlikely that anyone is listening.
This presents a real problem. The way the US electoral system works means that there’s basically no chance of a candidate from outside the two major parties winning the presidency — and the lack of preferential voting means that voters are unable to send a message to candidates in the way that Australians can in our Federal elections. If you cast a vote for, say, the Greens (or, god forbid, One Nation), you do so safe in the knowledge that if that party’s candidate fails to win your seat, you can also specify that your vote will ultimately go to your preferred major party.
This is not the case in the USA. If you vote for a third-party candidate in a Presidential election, your vote goes to that candidate, and that’s it. This means that the emergence of any such candidate who captures a meaningful proportion of the vote risks splitting the vote on their side of politics and ushering the other party into power. This is a particularly serious issue given that only a small number of voters in swing states ultimately decide the outcome of the election — and one such state is Michigan, which is home to some 240,000 Arab voters, and which the Democrats won by significantly less than 240,000 votes in 2020.
This fact has long allowed the Democrats to argue that voting for their candidates, however imperfect they may be, is essentially a moral imperative because failing to do so risks facilitating a Republican victory — and that ensuring that a Democrat in the White House is the only way to avoid all sorts of terrible things happening. (The fact that the terrible things have tended to happen anyway has rather undermined this argument, but the Democrats are sticking to it regardless.)
Since the chaotic years of the Trump presidency, this argument has been expanded to include the fact that a GOP victory in 2024 will mean another four years of a president liable to go rogue at any given moment. In this case, though, it’s Biden who’s going off-piste. His stance is so unpopular that it may well cost him next year’s election — but if it does, it’s not like a second Trump presidency will bring any change of policy on Israel, and it certainly won’t benefit Muslim Americans, however justified their distaste for Biden’s current stance.
This means that unless Biden starts actually listening to his advisers, neither candidate standing in next year’s election will represent a vote that will advocate for an action that the vast majority clearly want. And the alternative? Voting for a third-party candidate? Go ahead. Throw your vote away.
