"CARVILLE"
To be honest, but for Paul Wellstone’s funeral, we would
have won in Minnesota and probably Missouri. That would have
given us a tie (in the Senate). It’s not as shocking as it
could have been, though. America is getting ready to learn a
lesson, and that is that very minor shifts in voting can
produce policy earthquakes. And, stand by, because the policy
earthquakes are coming....You can see unbelievably rapid
loosening of environmental regulations and fundamental
restructuring or attempted restructuring of both the tax code
and the Social Security system, and you’re going to see a
PAC right-wing federal judiciary, and you’re going to see an
administration and a Congress that is 100 percent
representative of corporate interest. You’re going to see a
diminution of any protection for workers or anything like
that. You’re certainly going to see a huge legislation
passed and signed to limit products’ liability, defects in
products and medical malpractice. You name it. All of that is
coming." |
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A dark week for democracy
Posted November 10, 2002 thepeoplesvoice.org
By WILL
HUTTON DAN
The stranglehold the far
Right has now taken on America will make it a more divided, reactionary
and illiberal country.
The election in Georgia said
it all. The Democrat governor, Roy Barnes, had dared to remove the
Confederate symbol from the state flag last year. His Republican
challenger wanted to bring it back, to honour, he said, 300,000
Confederate 'veterans'. A Republican has not occupied Georgia's governor's
mansion since 1872. After last Tuesday, one does, courtesy of wanting to
celebrate a civil war fought to defend slavery.
Europeans do not understand the curious civilisation that the current
America is becoming, and the grip that a visceral and idiosyncratic
conservatism has on its national discourse. They especially do not
understand the undercurrents of an increasingly self-confident and subtle
racism that is its own variant of the forces that in Europe gave us Le Pen
and Pim Fortuyn. George Bush Jnr is a chip off the old multilateralist,
transatlantic establishment, runs the European argument. He may seem
hawkishly conservative but, in the end, he seeks UN resolutions like other
American Presidents. Even at home, his bark is worse than his bite.
Wrong, wrong and wrong again. Anyone who thinks the Tory party is
'nasty' has not encountered contemporary American republicanism. Georgia's
Republican Party, for example, is now lead by Ralph Reed, a long-time
crusader against abortion, divorce and single parent families. He would
regard last week's vote in the House of Lords allowing unmarried and gay
couples to adopt as the work of Satan. He is part of US conservatism's
ideological hard core.
Reed played every card he could. If the governorship was to be won
celebrating the Confederacy, the race for the Senate seat would be no less
shameless. The Democrat incumbent had lost three limbs fighting in
Vietnam, but was attacked for being unpatriotic - the worst accusation in
today's US - because he believed that unions should be able to recruit in
the newly established Department of Homeland Security.
And so one of American liberalism's darkest days was repeated across
the country. Minnesota and Missouri, long-time Democrat strongholds, fell.
Governor Jeb Bush, despite the Democrats insisting that justice now be
done for those infamous chads, won in Florida. As if to underscore
conservatism's ascendancy, the only Democrat gain was in Arkansas where
the Republican senator had suffered a messy divorce and his Democrat
challenger was even more pro-gun and pro-Bible than the incumbent.
The result is that the Republicans now control the Senate, House and
the presidency for the first time since President Eisenhower. The
consolidation of America as an ultra conservative country is going to take
place rapidly. Mr Bush may have offered a few tit-bits to show his
credentials as a 'compassionate conservative', like his concern to reduce
the price of prescription drugs for the elderly, but the core of the
Republican programme is anything but. There will be radical tax cuts for
the rich and the corporations; a freezing of all efforts to stiffen
regulation in the wake of America's corporate scandals; moves to privatise
the social security system; and a roll-back of environmental protection.
Abroad, there will be the continued construction of a new international
order built around the prejudices of the American Right; unqualified
support for Israel, building the National Missile Defence System and tepid
support for the framework of international law and treaties.
Nor do the Conservatives' ambitions stop there. Following the ideas of
the high priest of ultra conservatism, Leo Strauss, they want to construct
a republic of 'moral', god-fearing citizens who adhere to traditional
virtues, rewarding the rich who can only have become rich through the
virtue of hard work and penalising the poor who are only poor because of
their own fecklessness. Above all, by now having the opportunity to pack
the judiciary with extreme right-wing judges, they intend to do away with
the famous Roe v Wade judgment that legalised abortion. This is the most
fiercely reactionary programme to have emerged in any Western democracy
since the war, and for which last Tuesday's vote, argue Republicans, is an
explicit mandate.
Horseshit. George Bush has al-Qaeda and a low turn-out to thank for his
victory. The central message of his five-day tour of 15 key states in the
last week of the election was to play on Americans' fears about terrorism,
rallying them behind their national leader. When the electorate voted
locally, the Democrats had the edge, winning governorships in four of the
biggest industrial states - Illinois, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and
Michigan. The Democrats I have spoken to are so traumatised by the overall
defeat that they dismiss these gains as irrelevant; I think they are
wrong.
America is not a happy place. A generation of increasingly conservative
policies has shrunk the American middle and induced not just fantastic
inequality but a sharp decline in social mobility and opportunity. The
US's social contract, never more than minimalist, is now threadbare.
Consumer confidence is low; job insecurity high. American capitalism is
viewed with deep scepticism. Nor are the majority of Americans social
conservatives and closet racists; they do not want the clock put back over
women's rights, the environment and race.
The trouble was that this silent liberal majority was only prepared to
voice its preoccupations at state rather than national level, if it
bothered to vote at all. The Democrats had to find a way of voicing the
concerns of the mass of Americans while not undermining the President
during a national emergency, but to do that they had to have a powerful
pitch based on a liberal ideology as animating and dynamic as that of the
conservatives. They didn't and they lost.
But the game isn't up. America's conservatives, blinded by their
ideology and in control of every lever of government, will overreach
themselves and the reality of what they plan will become evident to all,
stirring the apathetic voter and reminding the best of America what it
stands for. Last week represented the highwater mark of American
conservatism and, although it looks bleak, the beginnings of the
long-awaited liberal revival. Not just the United States, but the world,
needs it badly. In the meantime, despite its flaws, give thanks to the
European Union for partial shelter from the conservative storm.
© Copyright 2002 All rights reserved by The Guardian Unlimited Observer
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