WeeklyWorker

23.11.2000

US presidential elections

Constitutional crisis cries out for clear programme

After more than two weeks of growing tension, bitterness and polarisation between the Republican and Democrat parties, the deadlocked US presidential election took another dramatic turn late on Tuesday November 21, with a decision by the supreme court of the state of Florida in Tallahassee.

At issue was the question whether the results of the manual recounts currently underway in Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade counties should be included in the certified final results for Florida. In a unanimous ruling, the bench - comprising six registered Democrats and one independent - determined that the state electoral authorities must take these recounted ballots into consideration. A deadline of Sunday November 26 was set for completion of manual recounting in all three counties.

The decision means that vice-president Al Gore now has a theoretical chance of overtaking governor George W Bush to take the state's 25 electoral college votes and, with them, the keys to the White House, although statistical projections from the manual recounting already conducted suggest that he will be hard pressed to secure sufficient 'new' votes to win the contest.

In their turn, the Republicans have cried foul and indicated their preparedness to seek legal, and possibly state legislative, remedies to what they decry as an unjust attempt to steal the election. What began as an accidental neck-and-neck in Florida is now turning into a constitutional crisis. At the very least there is a crisis of legitimacy. Whoever wins lacks authority. Moreover the corrupt underbelly of the two-party system has been exposed. Under such conditions mass action - if guided by a clear programme - can have a tremendous impact. Both parties, however, must surely be aware of opinion poll evidence pointing to growing discontent among the electorate. They know that the political price for prolonging the agony is undoubtedly rising with each passing day.

After two machine recounts and the inclusion of overseas ballots, Bush led by some 930 votes in Florida. For the Republican camp, that was enough. So they have used the courts to enforce a time limit. Hand recounts - open to challenge and interpretation, as in the UK - would be discontinued and discounted.

For the Democrat camp every vote counts, including the numerous cases of malpractice and cheating suddenly discovered - endemic, especially in Florida. Not that they have protested in past presidential elections.

According to figures published by Time magazine (November 20), this whole crisis revolves around some five-thousandths of one percent of the vote nationally, so that whoever emerges as the eventual winner can under no circumstances claim a meaningful victory. The whole polling process has inevitably become something of a laughing stock, and to a certain extent the perception of American democracy has become devalued. It would, however, be rash in the extreme to conclude, as some on the left will no doubt be prone to do, that the present debacle will automatically have long-term consequences for the stability of the political system itself.

It all depends on generating a mass movement. Here the tiny US left could provide a crucial lead, if it can leave behind its anarcho-leftist posturing and economistic routinism. Put another way, the left needs a programme for extreme democracy in the USA. What 1776 began and 1861 continued, the working class must complete.

True, we have a long way to go. It would not be rational to see the present deadlock as proof that American society is deeply divided along class lines. Yes, blacks and the poor, in so far as they vote at all, tend to be Democrat supporters, but many blue collar workers vote Republican; many members of the middle and upper classes - and not just among the intelligentsia and the media - vote Democrat. Nor should we forget that, as usual, apathy holds a strong grip, as the 50% turnout amply demonstrates.

On the most superficial level, the deadlock over the presidency reflects the pathetic mediocrity of both candidates and their almost indistinguishable platforms. However, what starts off as a fight between lofty patricians always gives space for a plebeian movement, along with its own method of settling disputes.

There is no doubt that in terms of the overall popular vote Gore is the winner - by a 0.2% hair's breadth. But the US is constitutionally a system of 50 federated states. This was the product of the 1776 revolution and the origins of the USA in 13 separate and independent states. As a result the president - the democratic emperor of the USA - is selected through 50 separate electoral colleges. Most of them operate not on the basis of proportional representation, but winner takes all.

This means that in states where one party is overwhelmingly predominant, supporters of the opposition are objectively doomed to cast meaningless votes - a situation familiar to electors in many British parliamentary constituencies, but at least the existence of the Liberal Democrats allows more sophisticated electors to engage in tactical voting. This is one area in which the candidacy of the Green Party's Ralph Nader needs to be addressed and I shall deal with it later.

The specific 'rights and wrongs' of the present situation are of supreme interest to us because they impact on the consciousness of the USA's 280 million citizens. Of course, the puling whinges of this or that candidate about 'unfairness' are totally insignificant when compared to the blatant corruption of US democracy by big business and big money. As Marxists, we can have no truck with any tendency that seeks in this instance to identify and support the 'lesser evil'. Both the major political parties, whether in power or in opposition, serve capital. Both Democrats and Republicans are in hock up to their necks when it comes to financial backing from the big corporations who in effect merge with the state. Between them the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Trilateral Commission provide most of the personnel for administrations of either stripe.

To give one iota of support or succour either to the Republicans or the Democrats, on whatever grounds, is nothing less than class treachery. Our interests might by chance momentarily coincide, but there can be no bloc with either side - the reformist-centrist left in the USA traditionally backs the Democrats out of lesser-evilism and because of trade union links. The Communist Party of the USA has, for instance, long been a Democratic Party ginger group.

Though brought out into the open by the tussle between Gore and Bush, the missing ballot boxes, flawed ballot papers and intimidation cast light on the systemic corruption of democracy in the USA as a whole. As is well known, in the USA, everyone from the president to your local school board governor or dog warden is appointed on the basis of democratic election, but at all significant levels of the state money and elections are inextricably interconnected. This applies even to the election of members of the judiciary.

Let us take just a couple of brief examples. In the state of Ohio recently, ginger groups representing various special interests pooled their resources, in the order of some $10 million, in order to get their preferred candidate elected to the state's supreme court bench. Or take the case of the Texas oil company Halliburton, once run by George W Bush's running mate, Dick Cheney. When the justices of the supreme court of Texas came up for election, Halliburton made electoral 'contributions' to three candidates in the polls, at a time when a case in which the company was involved was pending. It was, no doubt, mere coincidence, that the three judges, when duly elected thanks to this 'democratic' largesse, found in favour of Halliburton. Such cases could be multiplied almost indefinitely.

The interrelationship between money and power is, it need hardly be said, a cornerstone of the capitalist system itself and is nowhere better exemplified than in the case of the two main candidates for presidential office in the current election. Here we have the scions of two political dynasties, who belong to the quasi-aristocracy of the USA's purportedly egalitarian society, and who vie to occupy the quasi-royal throne of the presidency. Between them, they garnered a reported $3 billion in election contributions, overwhelmingly from big business interests and the like. Already they dispose of a measure of wealth, power and patronage that sets them immeasurably apart from the commonality of those 'ordinary folks' whom they supposedly wish to 'serve'.

Whoever the new incumbent turns out to be, he will instantly have in his gift some 3,000 coveted and cosseted posts in the new administration, not to mention an extended network comprising many more thousands of ambitious time-servers. Small wonder, therefore, that the contenders are so desperate to win.

Under such conditions you can perhaps understand why Ralph Nader's Green Party candidacy for president brought in some 2.7 million votes, including nearly 90,000 in Florida. To say that his proportion of the popular vote had a bearing on the deadlock is clearly incontestable, but this should not blind us to the fact that Nader and the Green Party are objectively little more than the voice of the inchoate, disgruntled and alienated petty bourgeoisie in American society. Anti-corporatist and advocate of a 'fair deal' he may be, but he has no problems with capitalism as a system, so long as it takes care of 'the small guy', whether in his store or his factory.

Nader's instincts, evident over many years of campaigning for consumers' rights and the rights of workers in their workplace, are protectionist and paternalistic, certainly not socialist. To portray him as a challenger to the existing system robs that phrase of any objective content and is just vacuous phrase-mongering. Nader neither comes from the working class, nor articulates an alternative to capitalism. He is a radical within the sphere of capitalist politics.

To give him credit, Nader himself would deny that his platform stems from the working class in the USA as a class. In this sense, he must clearly be differentiated from the mass social democratic parties in Europe, including the Labour Party. These parties have thoroughly bourgeois or capitalist politics, often to the right of Nader. However, because of their historical origins, membership, working class support and trade union affiliation, they are best defined as bourgeois workers' parties - i.e., parties communists and socialists have to intersect with. That could entail a tactical vote for them, because we must win the workers, not simply as an atomised mass, but through their organised expression.

Hence our fears, when we see comrades from the Socialist Workers Party and the Socialist Party exulting in Nader's "marvellous campaign", and trumpeting him and his party as representing the "spirit of Seattle". This seems no more than supporting Nader on the basis that he is the least of three evils. The "spirit of Seattle", so much beloved by some of our allies on the left, consisted of a cacophony of often mutually contradictory and antagonistic trends. Rebellion against corporate America is excellent. But we communists and socialists derive our strength, in the last analysis, not from following or adapting to the latest spontaneous movement, but from principle.

That should not, must not, result in sectarian sterility, but guide us in action. Voting Nader, a radical capitalist, is as unprincipled as voting for Gladstone's Liberals in 19th century Britain. To shun the forces mobilised behind Nadir under the banner of sectarian purity would be stupid. Equally, to mistake "the spirit of Seattle" for any kind of 'answer' could take the left who knows where.

Marxists must intervene in the anti-capitalist movement. We must also intervene in the Gore-Bush crisis. Of course our alternative to capitalism is socialism and the transition to a stateless, moneyless, nationless new global order. Extreme democracy is the bridge between the present and our desired future. The working class must highlight every democratic deficit and present its own solutions.

That is why in the USA the left needs an immediate democratic programme:

 

Michael Malkin