File spoon-archives/bhaskar.archive/bhaskar_2000/bhaskar.0011, message 50


Date: Sun, 26 Nov 2000 01:49:11 +0100
From: Jan Straathof <janstr-AT-chan.nl>
Subject: BHA: <fwd>US On The Road To Fascism?


i'm but a simple dutchy, but when i read the below stuff
i wonder and guess that now only a dual-presidency could
save the US ;-|

jan
--
The Republican right prepares for violence

By the Editorial Board
24 November 2000

Back to screen version

The frenzied response of the Bush campaign and its allies in the media
to Tuesday's ruling by the Florida Supreme Court has highlighted a
political fact of immense significance: the Republican Party has become
the organ of extreme right-wing forces that are prepared to use extra-
parliamentary and violent methods to achieve their aims.

Spokesmen for George W. Bush and pro-Republican media outlets
reacted to the court's decision, which simply affirmed the constitutional
requirement that all votes be fairly counted, with calls for the Florida
legislature to defy the court and appeals to the military of a semi-
insurrectionary character.

The barrage of lies and misinformationócharging the court with changing
the rules and rewriting the election statutes,î denouncing Democratic
candidate Al Gore as a thug out to steal the election, appealing to racist
and anti-Semitic sentimentsóhad its intended effect. On Wednesday morning
a mob of Bush supporters besieged the Miami/Dade County board of
canvassers, grabbing a Democratic lawyer and threatening to assault those
involved in manually recounting the ballots. A few hours later the
Democratic-controlled board announced it was abandoning its recount,
effectively disenfranchising hundreds of Gore supporters whose votes
were not registered in the original machine tally.

The official responses of the Gore and Bush campaigns to the court
ruling provided a stark contrast. Gore went on national television late
Tuesday to appeal for a show of national unity and a public commitment
by the Bush campaign to abide by the ultimate result of the Florida recount.
Repeating his offer to meet with his Republican opponent, Gore spoke as
a bourgeois politician worried over the prospect of an open breach within
the political establishment that could undermine an orderly transfer of power,
with unpredictable and potentially explosive consequences.

Bush's representative, former Secretary of State James Baker, did not
even bother to acknowledge Gore's appeals for unity or his offer to meet
with the Texas governor. Instead he denounced the Supreme Court ruling as
unacceptable and incited the Republican-controlled state legislature to
defy the court, saying, ìOne should not now be surprised if the Florida
legislature seeks to affirm the original rules.î

Baker was taking his cue from the Wall Street Journal, which had
editorialized in advance of the court decision: ìThe legislature has an
option, it seems to us a duty, to make clear that it standsready to resolve
any dispute between Mrs. Harris [the Republican Secretary of State and
co-chair of the Bush campaign in Florida] and the Supreme Court
Democrats. Since the Republicans now solidly control the legislature,
they hold the winning hand.î

Paralleling its role in the impeachment conspiracy against Bill Clinton,
the Wall Street Journal has served as the mouthpiece for the extreme-right
forces that have sought from election day on to pollute public opinion with
wild accusations and disinformation and hijack the election for the
Republicans. It has spearheaded the effort to foster a veritable mutiny
within the military against a possible Gore victory, using as the pretext the
rejection of several hundred legally deficient absentee ballots from overseas
military personnel.

On Wednesday the Journal carried an incendiary column entitled ìThe
Democratic Party's War on the Military.î Calling the exclusion of the military
ballots ìone more battle in the ongoing culture war between the core of the
Democratic Party and the US military,î the column exuded racism,
homophobia and hatred for the working class. The author spoke of the
ìtwitching carcassî of the Democratic Party's ìleftîóìteachers' unions,
feminist
activists, gay victimologists, black churches, faculty clubs.î

As the election crisis has progressed, thinly disguised appeals to racism
and anti-Semitism have with increasing frequency appeared in the broadsides
of Bush supporters. Republican backers have seized on the role of Jesse
Jackson to whip up anti-black prejudice and fastened on the large number
of Jewish retirees in Palm Beach to galvanize their fundamentalist partisans.

The Journal has not refrained from such methods. In the editorial cited
above it employed loaded terms to take a swipe at Florida's Jewish population,
charging that Mrs.Harris is ìunder fire for being a Southern aristocrat rather
than a New York sophisticate.î It went on to denounce the Democrats for
ìimport[ing] Jesse Jackson for some race-baiting.î

The editorial as a whole was a call for the Republican Party to forego
traditional constitutional restraints in its drive to capture the White House.
It concluded with a barely disguised injunction for a victorious Bush
campaign to fashion an administration along authoritarian lines:

ìThe conventional wisdom is that if with this hassle Governor Bush does
become President he will be a crippled one. Perhaps. But we find it equally
plausible that facing down the kind of assault now being waged in Florida
would be precisely the best preparation for what may lie ahead. It is
Governor Bush's nature to extend the velvet glove, but he will be much
more successful if he and his party can show that within it there is some
steel.

Significantly, the editorial was entitled ìThe Squeamish GOP?î The
Journal chooses its words advisedly, in this case employing a term that
connotes an aversion to bloodshed. The meaning of the newspaper's editors
was unmistakableóa Republican president must be prepared to use
violence and repression to impose its reactionary social agenda. Gaining
the White House by suppressing votes and riding roughshod over the
popular will is an excellent preparation for dealing with ìwhat may lie
aheadîói.e., widespread popular opposition.

It is high time to stop masking the character of the Republican right
with the complacent term ìconservative.î These are fascistic elements
who are breaking with the traditional methods of bourgeois democracy.

There is a logic to politics. Once influential sections of the ruling
elite conclude they cannot achieve their aims through democratic means
and take the path of conspiracy and repression, they are well on the way
to civil war.

It is not here a matter of predicting the imminent imposition of a military
dictatorship. But it would be the height of folly to ignore the signposts of
such a danger looming ahead. If the campaign the Republicans are waging
to gain the White House begins to resemble a covert operation akin to
those mounted by the CIA against US imperialism's liberal and leftist
opponents in Latin America for example, in Chile then it must follow
that an option under serious consideration is the Pinochet solution. No
one should doubt that Wall Street Journal editor Robert Bartley and the
reactionaries on his staff are already working out the arguments to justify
the use of violence against their political opponents and the working class.

The Wall Street Journal speaks for powerful sections of American big
business. These forces within the financial elite have increasingly adopted
the standpoint of the extreme right, and sponsored, financially and otherwise,
the growth of this fascistic element, precisely because they have come to
realize that they cannot impose their social agenda through normal democratic
channels.

They rely on the right-wing rabble that populate the corporate-controlled
media to conceal their anti-democratic aims and fill the airwaves with half-
truths and lies.Their strength does not lie in any great popular supportóon
the contrary, their support in the general population is marginal.

Rather, the strength of the Republican right consists in the fact that
it articulates more consistently and uncompromisingly than any other
bourgeois political grouping the requirements of the American corporate
elite. The radical right knows what it wants and is prepared to ride roughshod
over public opinion in order to get it. The Republicans do not play by the
normal constitutional rules, while their bourgeois opponents in the Democratic
Party wring their hands as impotent and passive onlookers. They embody a
demoralized liberalism, whose watered-down perspective of reform has
been discarded by the ruling class.

At the same time the Republican right senses that it has a narrow window
of opportunity for realizing its ambitions. It was staggered by the results of
the election, which registered a victory in the popular vote for Gore and,
if the intent of Florida voters were officially acknowledged, a Democratic
victory in the electoral vote as well. The combined vote for Gore and Green
Party candidate Ralph Nader showed, broadly speaking, that a significant
majority of the electorate supported policies of a liberal and leftist
character,
and opposed the increasingly naked domination of corporate power over
American politics.

A look at the electoral map underscores the fact that the overall trajectory
of American society does not favor the forces of the radical right. Bush
piled up the vast majority of his electoral votes in the more backward and
rural regions of the countryóthe South, the Southwest, sections of the
Midwest. The more urbanized, industrialized, densely populated and
culturally vibrant regions went for Gore. Within this general scheme, the
decisive pro-Gore margin in the popular vote was provided by blacks and
other highly oppressed sections of the working class, whose vote expressed
deep distrust of the Republicans and a determination to defend past gains
in civil rights and social conditions.

Moreover, the economic conditions fostering the rise of nouveau riche
layers that comprise a critical component of the Republican right's social
base are clearly receding. The stock market boom, based to a considerable
extent on speculative capital, parasitism and outright swindling, is breaking
up, leaving in its wake a society more economically polarized than at any
other period in the past half-century, and a spectacle of corporate greed
and criminality of unprecedented dimensions.

The response of the Republican right is growing hysteria. Its frenzy and
recklessness bespeak a rebellion by a minority that feels it must stake all
on immediate victory, because its future prospects are dwindling. The
Republicans sense that the 2000 election is their best, and perhaps last,
chance to seize hold of all the branches of government. If they lose the
White House, they face the prospect of internal warfare and political
disintegration.

Notwithstanding the many obvious differences, there are striking parallels
between the political crisis arising from the 2000 election and the convulsive
period that led up to the Civil War of 1861. One of these is the similarity in
psychology and methods between the Republican right of today and the
political representatives of the Southern slave owners 150 years ago. In both
cases, the most reactionary social forces in the nation were driven by a sense
of desperation, arising from the fact that the momentum of historical
development was moving against them, to employ the most provocative and
reckless methods.

One great difference, to extend the historical analogy, is the absence
within any faction of bourgeois politics today of a force either willing or
able to take on and defeat the radical right. As they have repeatedly
demonstrated, the flaccid ranks of liberalism, institutionalized in the
Democratic Party, are organically incapable of waging a serious struggle
in defense of democratic rights. That task now falls to the working class,
which must construct its own mass, socialist party to carry it out.


                              Copyright 1998-2000
                            World Socialist Web Site
                              All rights reserved

World Socialist Web Site: www.wsws.org
WSWS : News & Analysis : North America : US Elections




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