The Challenge of the the 2016 Elections

 

We find ourselves immersed in the debate that will conclude with the election of the next president of the United States of America. The contest is between the candidates of the nation’s largest and most traditional political parties: the candidate for the Republican party, Donald Trump, and that of the Democrats, Hillary Clinton.

The Republican party, traditionally conservative and allied with the powerful interests that have sustained the capitalist system and promoted the material and economic success of this great nation, faces today, with their candidate Trump — among others — two serious problems. On the one hand, he promotes discrimination and intolerance; on the other, this candidate does not belong to the traditional political structure of the Republican party.

The discourse of Trump gathers and exploits the worst sentiments of those who, like himself, forget the condition of immigrants while claiming to be natives and owners of a land that does not belong to them; they forget that this nation has always been a land of immigrants. It has been this so-called melting pot, precisely, that has enabled America to become a powerful nation before the rest of the world. It is for this reason that this discourse becomes populist, demagogic, hurtful and dangerous for the political and social stability of the United States and the world.

The party of the Democrats, on the other hand, traditionally liberal and allied with the cause of the working class, those who have fewer opportunities to access the social benefits provided by this nation, has embraced — indiscriminately and finally — a series of causes and laws of a postmodernist type such as abortion or marriage between people of the same sex, that discount the traditions and fundamental human values upon which this nation was founded, like the right to life and the family; issues that, although novel, protect a few minorities and satisfy postmodern tendencies according to which each one — seeking their personal pleasure and satisfaction — build their own life as they please, distort and hide the truth in the midst of a thousand half-truths and take us dangerously close to the border of disaster with a moral relativism where it is no longer possible to discern — for the good of individuals as well as for society — what is fundamental from what is accessory, what is essential from what is accidental, what is permanent from what is transitory and ephemeral.

Given these political circumstances, succinctly described, today it is more difficult to decide for whom to vote, what person or political group to elect to guide the destiny of this nation. Today, the great majority of voters feel confused, uncertain and discouraged when it is time to choose between the political alternatives just described. Political alternatives — Democrats or Republicans — with extreme positions, both populist and equally dangerous — as we have said — for the near future of families, society, this nation and the world.

Moreover, and to worsen the political electoral atmosphere in which we find ourselves immersed, other social institutions that would have the role and the moral responsibility to orient Americans for the best political choice possible, find themselves today — as never before — discredited and, for that reason, without authority to guide us in this historical crossroad that is political, social, cultural and electoral.

We face a political choice will not be between two good proposals for the nation, or between a good proposal and a bad one; rather we find ourselves obliged to choose between them or, as they say in philosophy, to choose between the lesser of two evils.

In this situation, the electoral panorama proposed to us is very difficult and between which we must make a choice. The scene reveals the moral and spiritual decadence of our society according to which our material and economic progress as a society does not coincide with the human, moral and spiritual progress, unveiling the lack of political leaders who are well formed morally to fight for the common good and, finally, a political panorama that — for all that we have said — urges us to continue struggling in the search to establish and continue consolidating this society and nation in the grand values of humanity, such as the truth for liberty, justice for peace and solidarity for survival. Therefore, we have to choose between the lesser of two evils!