The
2000 election and Bush’s attack on democratic rights
By
Barry Grey
14 November 2001
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In the
weeks since the September 11 terror attacks, the media have devoted their
efforts to supporting the Bush administration’s war in Afghanistan
and its assault on democratic rights, uncritically repeating the
government’s propaganda and tamely acceding to its clampdown on all
independent information.
As in the
wars of the 1990s—the Persian Gulf, Somalia, Kosovo—the public is
being inundated with reportage that excludes any serious consideration of
historical background or political context, without which it is impossible to
make an intelligent assessment of current events. The mind-numbing barrage of
patriotic images and martial slogans, the demonization of enemies and the
reduction of world politics to a struggle between the forces of good (the US)
and evil (the latest target of American bombs) is intended to induce a form of historical
amnesia, in which the events of today are detached from the chain of
development that preceded and produced them.
Such a
shallow and demagogic approach is an essential element of propaganda that seeks
not to inform or educate, but rather to disorient the masses and stampede them
into supporting policies that are aimed against their interests.
As part
of this propaganda campaign, a myth of September 11 has been created that is
summed up in the phrase “Everything changed.” This is meant to
suggest that none of the sweeping changes in American political life that have
occurred after that date have any relation to events that preceded it. All of
the far-reaching institutional innovations that have expanded the
government’s police powers and curtailed civil liberties have,
supposedly, been carried out in response to the unforeseen and unforeseeable
events of September 11. They are to be explained entirely by the exigencies of
a “war on two fronts” against global terrorism—a war that was
forced on the Bush administration.
No one
has sought to demonstrate—least of all the Bush administration—why
the hijack-bombing of the World
Trade Center
and the Pentagon necessitated a war against Afghanistan,
or why it dictated major steps toward the establishment of a police state in
the US. The
“everything changed” mantra is based on a cynical and self-serving
lie. In reality, the assault on democratic rights since September 11 is a
continuation and acceleration of processes well under way prior to the terror
attacks.
The 2000 election
One year
ago the American ruling elite broke in a fundamental and irrevocable manner
with democratic norms and procedures. For the first time in US
history, it decided the result of a national election by suppressing votes and
overriding the will of the electorate.
The
Democratic candidate, Al Gore, won the popular vote nationally by some 600,000
votes, but Election Day ended with neither candidate holding a majority of the
electoral votes, and the result in the pivotal state of Florida
in dispute. (Under the archaic system established by America’s
founding fathers, the presidential race is not decided by the popular vote. The
president is actually chosen by electors from the various states. The number of
a state’s electors is equal to the number of its representatives in the
House of Representatives plus two—the number of senators from each
state.)
Had the
votes in Florida
been counted in a fair and impartial manner, Gore would have won that state and
its 25 electoral votes, and been declared the next president. That, however, is
not what happened. Instead, the votes of thousands of Floridians were
suppressed and, by means of fraud and conspiracy, the Republican candidate,
George W. Bush, was installed in the White House.
Future
generations will look back on the election of 2000 as the definitive point at
which the American ruling class embarked on the road to dictatorship. All of
the authoritarian impulses that have assumed such ominous and concrete forms
since September 11 were already revealed in the methods employed by the Bush
campaign and the Republican Party to effect an electoral coup d’état.
Nine days
before the US Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, stopped the counting of
disputed votes in the pivotal state of Florida,
thereby handing the election to Bush, the chairman of the World Socialist Web Site editorial board,
David North, summed up the basic issues in the election crisis in a report to a
public meeting in Sydney, Australia.
[“US
election turmoil marks the onset of a revolutionary crisis”] North
said:
“What
the decision of this court will reveal is how far the American ruling class is
prepared to go in breaking with traditional bourgeois-democratic and constitutional
norms. Is it prepared to sanction ballot fraud and the suppression of votes and
install in the White House a candidate who has attained that office through
blatantly illegal and anti-democratic methods?”
On December 12, 2000 the US Supreme
Court did precisely that. Five right-wing Republican justices, unelected and
unanswerable to the American people, handed down a decision reeking with
contempt for democratic rights and devoid of any legal or constitutional
scruples. This was a court whose majority had employed the mantras of
“states’ rights” and “judicial restraint” to
curtail the power of the federal government to enforce laws protecting the
rights of workers and minorities. But when the issue was posed: what considerations
would guide the resolution of the contested election in Florida—the need
to determine the will of the electorate, or the desire of the most right-wing
sections of the ruling elite to install its man in the White House—the
Supreme Court inserted itself into the internal affairs of Florida and took the
extraordinary action of overriding the state’s highest court.
The
Florida Supreme Court had overruled the attempt of the state’s Republican
administration, headed by Governor Jeb Bush, to certify George W. Bush, the
governor’s brother, as the winner of the presidential race on the basis
of a margin of a few hundred votes. Republican election officials had secured
Bush’s margin by blocking or disregarding hand counts of thousands of
ballots that had not registered a presidential preference in the machine
tabulations. (Such hand counts are stipulated in the law of Florida
and most other states as the means for resolving contested elections.) The Florida
high court demanded that the uncounted ballots be counted.
In taking
this action, the Florida
justices invoked the basic democratic principles of popular sovereignty and the
right to vote. They asserted, “The right of suffrage is the pre-eminent
right contained in the [Florida]
Declaration of Rights, for without this basic freedom all others would be
diminished.”
Antonin
Scalia, the ideological spokesman for the extreme right-wing faction on the US
Supreme Court, excoriated the Florida
court for raising these democratic principles. On the basis of a reactionary
interpretation of the US Constitution, one that flies in the face of
constitutional jurisprudence since the Civil War, he declared that American
citizens had no constitutional right to vote for the president of the United
States. This explicit repudiation of the
right to vote became the anchor for the December 12 decision that installed
George W. Bush in the White House by discarding the votes of thousands of
Floridians.
The
following day, Democratic candidate Al Gore delivered a craven concession
speech, equating the court’s attack on the right to vote with “the
rule of law” and calling on all Americans to rally behind the
“president-elect.”
Two
months later, in a report to an international school in Sydney,
WSWS editorial board member Barry Grey drew the following balance sheet on the
2000 election: [“The world historical
implications of the political crisis in the United States”]
“The
2000 election in the United States
is a historical watershed. It marks an irrevocable break with the forms and
traditions of American democracy.... Notwithstanding the attempts of the media
and the political establishment—liberal no less than
conservative—to pass over the events of November and December 2000 and
‘move on,’ as though nothing of great significance had occurred,
America has been changed in a fundamental way, and nothing will ever be the
same in the United States, or, for that matter, the world.”
Grey went
on to say: “The United
States has not been transformed into a
dictatorship. But its ruling elite has embarked on a course that must lead
either to authoritarian rule of a fascist type, or social revolution.”
The political wars
of the 1990s
The 2000
election crisis brought to a head a bitter conflict over policy and strategy
that had been raging within the US ruling elite for the previous decade. A
substantial section of the corporate and political establishment never accepted
the legitimacy of the Clinton-Gore administration. Despite Clinton’s
efforts to conciliate the Republican right and adapt to its social agenda,
powerful forces within financial and corporate circles saw his administration
as a retreat from the aggressive anti-labor and pro-business policies of Reagan
and the elder George Bush. They bitterly resented Clinton’s token
gestures toward social reform.
The
agenda of this faction of the ruling class is now being revealed in the
unfettered militarism of the Bush administration and its frontal assault on
democratic rights. In essence it consists in the removal of all
restrictions—legal, political and moral—on the accumulation of
private wealth and the amassing of profit.
These
forces sought to remove Clinton from office, backing the series of scandals and
provocations that culminated in the impeachment and Senate trial of the
Democratic president. The methods they employed—conspiracy, provocation,
character assassination—already signaled a break with bourgeois legality
and traditional democratic norms.
Such
“dirty tricks” were the modus operandi of fascistic tendencies that
had gained dominant influence over the Republican Party. What was once the
staid party of corporate conservatism, with a popular base in rural and
small-town America, had come under the political wing of the Christian right,
the gun lobby, anti-abortion zealots and militia elements.
In the
1994 elections the Republican right, led by Georgia Republican Newt Gingrich,
gained control of both houses of Congress. Gingrich and company sought to
impose their reactionary social program by shutting down the federal government
at the end of 1995 and the beginning of 1996. Clinton was able to capitalize on
the resulting popular anger and win reelection in 1996.
This
experience convinced influential sections of the ruling elite that they could
not overcome popular opposition to their policies by traditional parliamentary
and democratic means. They set out to oust a twice-elected president by means
of a quasi-legal coup. The network of Christian fundamentalist groups,
right-wing talk show hosts, Republican lawyers and judges and their allies in
the highest echelons of the mass media mobilized behind the Republican Congress
and Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr to humiliate Clinton, destabilize his
government and ultimately bring it down. Such were the origins of the Paula
Jones sexual harassment suit and the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
The
Republican right moved with reckless defiance of popular sentiment, which was
overwhelmingly opposed to the attempt to leverage a sex scandal into the
removal of an elected president. The 1998 congressional election was a
political debacle for the Republicans, whose majority in the House of
Representatives was slashed. Gingrich himself was forced to step down as
Speaker of the House and quickly resigned his seat, but the popular verdict on
impeachment reflected in the election only reinforced the conviction of the
right wing that it had to employ extra-parliamentary and pseudo-legal means to
achieve its ends. The Republicans proceeded with their coup attempt, and the
following month the House, in a strictly partisan vote, impeached
Clinton—the first-ever impeachment of an elected president.
Ultimately,
the growing anger in the population at large convinced the ruling elite to back
down, and the Senate acquitted Clinton. But this new defeat only fueled the
desperation and ruthlessness of the Republican right. Backed by the most
powerful sections of the corporate oligarchy, it was determined to gain control
of all of the levers of political power by capturing the White House in 2000.
It chose as its standard-bearer a political and intellectual cipher with ties
to big oil, who had the advantage of name recognition, held generally
right-wing views, and could be counted on to carry out the dictates of his
sponsors on Wall Street and in US industry.
For the
Republicans, the 2000 election was the last best chance to achieve their goals.
They saw it as a window of opportunity in a social and political situation that
was moving against them. The 1990s had demonstrated that there existed no mass
support for their social agenda. As Election Day approached, it was already
clear that the stock market boom of the previous two decades, which had played
an immense role in building a Republican constituency of nouveau riche layers,
was unraveling. The social and political implications of a recession, under
conditions of a staggering growth of social inequality and the shredding of the
social safety net, were incalculable.
The
Republicans saw a country, demographically and socially, that was moving, in
objective terms, against them. These forces were determined to use any means to
gain the White House and utilize their control of the judiciary and Congress to
beat back what they perceived as the growing threat of the masses.
In the
course of the five-week struggle over the Florida vote that ended with the
intervention of the US Supreme Court, the Republican Party organized a mob
attack on election officials in Miami-Dade County that had the intended effect
of convincing them to shut down their recount of disputed ballots. It made
direct appeals to the US military to oppose the recounts that were requested by
the Democrats and sanctioned by the Florida Supreme Court. It sought to whip up
a progromist frenzy within the fascist right, employing the technique of the
“big lie” to accuse the Democrats of doing precisely what it was
doing—stealing the election.
The
Republican administration in Florida intervened repeatedly to disrupt manual
recounts in three heavily Democratic southern counties, and the
Republican-dominated state legislature, with the encouragement of Bush campaign
officials and Supreme Court Justice Scalia, prepared to select its own pro-Bush
slate of presidential electors, in the event that Republican efforts to halt
the counting of votes failed and Gore was declared the winner.
Social
polarization and class antagonisms
Underlying
the election crisis and the break with democratic norms was the most salient
feature of contemporary American life—a phenomenon that holds such
immense and revolutionary significance, it is generally excluded by the
powers-that-be from what passes for political discourse. That feature is the
staggering growth of social inequality, which has made the US the most socially
polarized of all the advanced capitalist countries.
The
growth of social inequality over the past 20 years has been accompanied by
other far-reaching changes in the social structure of America. These have been
fueled, at the most basic level, by the vast transformations in world
economy—denoted by the term “globalization”—that are
bound up with the revolutionary developments in computer and communications
technology in the concluding decades of the twentieth century.
The
United States has undergone a process of proletarianization, as large sections
of what was traditionally considered the middle class—white-collar
employees, professionals, small farmers, shopkeepers—found themselves
propelled into the ranks of America’s wage earners. As the numerical
strength of the working class has grown, the social weight of the middle class
has declined. Objectively speaking, the United States is today, more than at
any other time in the postwar period, polarized between the working class and
the bourgeoisie, with far less of a middle class to serve as a bastion of
parliamentary democracy and political stability.
At the
same time, the growing weight of world economy and the world market has
fostered the growth of centrifugal tendencies throughout society, including
within the ruling class, where the old established “Sixty Families”
have been at least partially supplanted by upstart moguls who have grown
fabulously rich in an environment of rapid technological change and rampant
financial speculation.
These
shifts at the base of society have found their reflection in the political
superstructure, where political consensus has given way to ferocious warfare
within the establishment, and the entire political system has grown increasingly
distant and alienated from the popular masses. As the axis of bourgeois
politics has lurched to the right, the social base of both parties has
shriveled, and the political apparatus has come to resemble an inverted
pyramid—corrupt, ossified, and deeply unstable.
As David
North put it in his December 3, 2000 lecture in Sydney: “The relationship
between political forms and the class structure of society is of a complex,
dialectical character. But in the long run, there comes a point at which the social
tensions produced by rampant social inequality cannot be contained within
traditional democratic forms. American society has reached that point.”
The character of
the Bush administration
As
horrific and tragic as the events of September 11 were, they were not the cause
of the sweeping assault on democratic rights that has since ensued. Indeed, the
murky circumstances surrounding the hijack-bombings remain
unexplained—how, above all, a group of suspected Arab terrorists could
organize and execute such a complex assault on strategic centers of US economic
and military power without being detected or blocked by American intelligence
agencies.
What is
clear, however, is that the Bush administration seized on the events of
September 11 to implement repressive measures that had long been centerpieces
of the reactionary agenda of the Republican right. The most that can be said is
that the atmosphere of anxiety and anger produced by the terror attacks enabled
the administration to proceed more swiftly than it could have previously
anticipated. But the attack on democratic rights of the past two months was
already foreshadowed in the anti-democratic methods by which Bush came to
power.
A
government that seizes power by means of fraud and usurpation must rule by the
same means. It is, in objective terms, a government of provocation and
coercion, with no democratic mandate and no constitutional legitimacy. Lacking
a serious base of public support, and facing a deepening economic and social
crisis, it was inevitable that the Bush administration would turn to repression
and violence to defend itself against the threat of resistance from below.
It is
necessary to speak bluntly: the people who are running the US government are
the same gangster elements who stole the 2000 election. Why should anyone doubt
that given the chance, they would jump at the opportunity to dismantle
constitutional safeguards and destroy civil liberties?
A survey
of the leading personnel of the Bush administration confirms this assessment.
They are a combination of military men and veterans of the Reagan and Bush (the
elder) administrations, most of whom became multimillionaires by parlaying
their political connections into lucrative posts in industries such as big oil
and pharmaceuticals. One prominent figure, Solicitor General Theodore Olson,
was intimately involved in the anti-Clinton conspiracies of the 1990s, and
another, United Nations Ambassador John Negroponte, worked closely with death
squad leaders and military assassins in Central America as US ambassador to
Honduras during Washington’s covert wars of the 1980s.
A few
days before the Supreme Court intervened to halt the counting of votes in
Florida, Al Gore made a nationally televised speech. It was one of the rare
occasions when the Democratic candidate directly broached the principled issues
of democratic rights at stake in the election crisis. Gore raised the entirely
legitimate question: “If we ignore the votes of thousands in Florida in
this election, how can you or any American have confidence that your vote will
not be ignored in a future election?”
In light
of recent events, the question should be rephrased as follows: how can any
American be sure that there will be a
future election? Those who might be inclined to dismiss such a question as
far-fetched should recall that only last month the mayor of New York suggested
that, in the interests of prosecuting the “war against terrorism,”
the city’s municipal election be postponed and he be allowed to remain in
office after the expiration of his term. This flagrantly unconstitutional
proposal received considerable support from within the financial and political
establishment and from sections of the national and local media.
The working class
and the defense of democratic rights
It is necessary
to issue a clear warning: the American working class is being stripped of it
basic democratic rights. This attack is largely being carried out behind the
backs of the American people. Its source is not simply the right-wing cabal
that stole the 2000 election and presently controls the reins of government.
Rather it is rooted in the contradictions of the capitalist system, a social
order that is incapable of addressing the most basic needs of the broad mass of
the people. That the attack on democratic rights is an organic outgrowth of the
economic system is demonstrated by the refusal of any of the political forces
that defend the system—the bourgeois parties, the trade union
bureaucracy, the courts, the mass media—to oppose it.
The 2000
election demonstrated that there is no longer any significant constituency
within the American corporate and political establishment for the defense of
democratic rights. Powerful, and politically dominant, sections of the American
ruling elite have broken with democratic procedures. Within the liberal
sections of the establishment, which long ago abandoned any commitment to
social reform or a lessening of economic inequality, the prevailing attitude is
a combination of cowardice and indifference. The Democrats’ half-hearted
and conciliatory response to the theft of the election demonstrated
conclusively that they fear a movement of the masses far more than they fear
the fascistic methods and aims of the Republican right.
The only
social force that has a vested interest in upholding democratic rights, and
remains genuinely committed to their defense, is the working class. But it can
prepare and carry out the necessary struggle only by freeing itself from the
political domination of the parties and representatives of the capitalist
ruling elite.
The 2000
election opened up a new chapter in US
history, in which the class contradictions that suffuse all aspects of social
life, but have been expunged from official politics and debate, are inexorably
coming to the fore.
Great social
struggles are on the agenda. The most critical question is the assimilation by
the most conscious and courageous sections of the workers, students and
intellectuals of the political lessons of the strategic experiences of the
previous century. Among these is the 2000 election.
The
Socialist Equality Party and its political organ, the World Socialist Web Site, are committed to
providing the historical and political analysis that will enable these layers
to draw the appropriate conclusions from generations of struggle for democratic
rights and social equality, and build an independent mass party of the working
class based on the program of international socialism.
Steve McAlexander
"Strength and Honor"
John Adams wrote in 1772: "There is danger from
all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living
with power to endanger the public liberty." Thomas Jefferson wrote in
1799, "Free government is founded in jealousy, not confidence.... Let no
more be heard of confidence in men, but bind him down from mischief by the
chains of the Constitutions."