By *Jomo Sanga Thomas
(“Plain Talk” Feb. 7, 2025)
America is a political duopoly. A duopoly refers to a reality where two parties dominate the political landscape and do everything to block the participation of any other group. In such a system, one party tends to dominate government at any given time (the majority party), while the other has only limited power (the minority party).
Because of America’s place in the world, its economic, military and cultural dominance project across the globe through its mass media, many people have developed a love-hate relationship with its political system.
At the most simplistic level, much of our understanding of the world comes from the sloganeering of the Democratic and Republican parties. These parties run their state and presidential campaigns by scapegoating or presenting a bogeyman to the electoral. In the run-up to the 1980 presidential elections, Ronald Reagan launched his campaign in Mississippi, declaring that “the South will rise again”. The South, it must be remembered, is where enslaved Africans offer up their blood, sweat and tears that built America’s economic foundation.
George Bush Sr. launched his 1988 campaign with the Willie Horton TV ad. William Horton was a black man who committed a crime soon after his early release from prison. The ad depicted his democratic opponent as being soft on crime. Clinton used welfare excesses and rising crime to sail into the White House, Obama won with his “Yes We Can” smiley, “hopey” promise, and Trump told Americans he wanted to “make America great again”.
During his first term, Trump claimed he was going to Washington “to drain the swamp”. By the end of his term, some of the worst swamp monsters had crawled from the furthest reaches of the continental US, to devour anything and everything in America and the world. Trump redux has placed immigrants from the Global South in his bull’s eye.
All of these slogans were intended to win voices and voters. None was designed to transform America for the better. At every turn, it is the poor and vulnerable, the weak and disenfranchised, who are “otherised” and victimised. They are almost always portrayed as a menace to society who must be despised and punished.
It does not matter which party, Democrat or Republican, controls the White House. If you live in the global South or have migrated to the United States because of America’s destabilising policies across the world, look out because Uncle Sam is coming for you.
In this cycle, immigrants are in the crosshairs of the Republican elite. If you fail to pay attention, you would not know that both parties have aggressively downplayed the contributions of immigrants to pander to a white population that is increasingly finding life more difficult. The American political elite stokes racism to distract, divert, and confuse the majority of Americans as to who their real enemies are: the rich and powerful. They become rich while the vast majority of American citizens wallow in misery and despair.
Information from the Migration Policy Institute reveals that Bill Clinton deported 12 million; George Bush Sr. deported 10 million; Obama, six million; Trump, 1 three million; and Biden, 5 million. Now Trump is proposing to ensure “the largest deportation in the history of America”.
What is left out of the conversation is that the combined income of immigrants is US$2.1 trillion. Immigrants pay US$383 billion in federal income tax and US$197 billion in state income tax. Clearly, this is not a record of persons living off the system. The notion that immigrants are “welfare queens” driving around in expensive Cadillacs or wild rapists and criminals stalking the streets of America is grossly exaggerated.
Of telling significance is we have seen no handcuffed and shackled plane loads of persons bound for European capitals. You would be naive to think that there are no illegal immigrants from Europe. Think of the Russian/Ukraine war and the seamless manner in which Ukrainians (whites) were integrated into European and American societies. Contrast that with the videos of Africans allowed to drown as they attempt to cross the Mediterranean Sea to Europe.
It was not the greed of immigrants that created the 2008 economic and financial crisis. Yet, not a single banker or corporate executive was tried and jailed for the crimes and the suffering they caused. In fact, speaking to a group of top executives in 2009, Obama reminded them that he “stood between them and the pitchfork”. While the rich were bailed out, many middle-income families lost their homes and life savings due to the financial meltdown. Black families lost more wealth during the Obama presidency than in the previous 100 years. Yet, they fiercely loved their black president, who was quick to remind them that he could not be a president for African Americans as though anyone ever asked him to be.
The political duopoly plays the same trick on voters on the issue of privacy and women’s rights, which is often played out in the media as the right to an abortion. Republicans vying for the religious/Christian/evangelist vote claim to be staunchly anti-abortion and pro-life. Democrats, in contrast, propagandise that they are for privacy and women’s rights. Yet after the election of Obama in 2008, the democrats controlled the three branches of government with the ability to secure forever the privacy/abortion rights protected in Roe v Wade. However, as president, Obama declared that protection of privacy and women’s rights was not a priority for his administration.
The duopoly wants to keep issues like immigration, crime and women’s rights as election campaign issues. This is why immigration reform was last done under President Reagan in 1986. While Trump bellows that he wants to deport immigrants, Obama derisively described as the “deporter-in-chief” for the millions he sent back to an uncertain future does so on the down low.
Biden-Harris Democrats presided over a genocide in Gaza, and now the Trump-Vance Republicans continue the holocaust with demands for ethnic cleansing.
We can only see clearly when we refuse to allow politicians to throw dust into our faces. As Mom would say, “American politics is a mess: six of one, half a dozen of the next.”
*Jomo Sanga Thomas is a lawyer, journalist, social commentator and a former Speaker of the House of Assembly in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
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A very self opiniated article. This article is about the authors personal view of the US. The same US system that he and many others used to further their edication and themselves to be where they are. Critical of the very system that made them who they are.
Jomo Thomas never ceases to degrade the meaning of the terms “genocide” and Holocaust” while trivializing the fate of those who have been the victims of these wicked atrocities.