U. of Washington Student: Seattle’s one-party system should change
Not all Washington state’s college students are enamored with Democratic Party policies.
In the University of Washington’s The Daily, student Preston Sahabu explains his reasons for chaffing at Seattle’s one-party rule.
Seattle is commonly hailed as a liberal bastion of America, where everyone is free to marry whomever they love, our police department hands out bags of Doritos at a marijuana festival, and our waste disposal bins come in environmentally friendly trios.
But beneath the shadow of the mountain and the Needle lies great injustice, washed out by the glare of our progressive gilding.
The city’s signature university is privatizing, with tuition spiking as public funding dwindles. Seattle Metro is facing a 19 percent cut in funding, and the light rail continues to drag its feet. Rent continues to skyrocket as neighborhoods gentrify, redlining the poor to the ghettos, while banks foreclose on homes, forcing even more to the streets. The Justice Department investigated our police for systemic overuse of force, especially against minorities, and the 2010 Census revealed our city to be the most segregated in the nation.
Public schools are closing and class sizes are increasing, while profit-squeezing charter schools loom. The environmentally catastrophic coal train project continues to build steam. Workers slave away in the warehouses of Amazon and the service industries like Starbucks, while regressive taxation continues to eat their savings.
All of this in a one-party town, firmly in the grasp of the Democrats. Given all the misery inflicted on the very disempowered the Democratic Party claims to protect, at the very least our establishment politicians are mindblowingly incompetent. More likely, they are bankrolled and manipulated by the privileged who want to maintain the status quo, the real estate developers, and the behemoths of industry and commerce.
Put neatly, our Democrats are true Seattleites — friendly on the outside, conservative on the inside. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, for as Gore Vidal once said, “The United States has one business party with two right-wing factions: the Democrats and the Republicans.”
What is to be done? The answer is straightforward: Break with the Democratic Party.