13.10.2004

Vapour of democracy

In his regular column, Martin Schreader keeps us abreast of the US elections

The method of materialist dialectics teaches that quantitative changes lead to qualitative transformations.

The most well known example of this is the raising of the temperature of a container of water. As the temperature approaches the boiling point, the water simmers but does not boil. One degree higher, however, and the container brims over, as the water qualitatively transforms itself into vapour. This basic postulate of dialectics applies to the development of class society as much as it does the physics of heat transference.

For close to 30 years, beginning in the 1970s, the United States underwent a process of quantitative changes to its political, economic and social development. This process (‘Weimarisation’) shifted the overt basis of capitalist rule from the traditional institutions of bourgeois-democratic governance to the armed enforcers of ‘order’. It was inevitable that this process would reach a point of qualitative change. In the view of this author, that point was reached on November 7 2000. On that day, the republic that was born in the fires of the second American revolution (the civil war and reconstruction) collapsed and died.

For close to a year before, a renewed struggle against global capitalism had been underway. The massive protests against the World Trade Organisation in Seattle, Washington, at the end of 1999 had ushered in a new period of class struggle. The capitalists thought they had buried the class struggle along with the Soviet Union in 1991. Thus, the sight of workers, youth and radical activists marching together against globalisation and ‘free trade’ - against capitalism - was a nightmare come true.
The Seattle events forced the capitalists to address the fact that they still had to contend with a mass movement opposed to unbridled capitalist exploitation. In the US, this discussion found expression in the presidential contest of 2000.

For the American capitalist class, the debate was not over whether or not to continue with the ‘free trade’ policies of the 1980s and 1990s. Rather, the differences were over how to handle the response to these policies. For one section of the capitalist class, personified by Al Gore and the Democratic Party leadership, pacification and co-optation were the best tools. For another section, pacification of this type was no longer profitable. Repression was their solution, and George W Bush was their candidate.

Indeed, it was not for nothing that Bush characterised the differences between himself and Gore as a “difference of opinion, not principle.” Both candidates made that clear throughout the debates: for example, it was never a question of whether or not the US needed to spend billions on ‘defence’, but a question of how much. The narrowness of the differences between Bush and Gore in 2000 led to one of the lowest voter turnouts in the last century. More than half of those eligible to cast a ballot ‘voted with their feet’ and stayed home on election day.

By now, most people know what happened next: the closeness of the Florida vote; the lawsuits; the Supreme Court decision. What many people do not know is how it came to this, or what it meant for what was left of ‘democracy’ in the United States.

Bush’s ‘victory’ in Florida was the result of three main factors: disenfranchisement of black voters, vote-tampering and extralegal terrorism.

Months before the first votes were cast in 2000, the Florida state government (run by Bush’s brother) contracted with a private firm in Texas (whose owners were large contributors to Bush) to compile a list of ‘suspected felons’ to be removed from the voter rolls. (In many states, convicted felons, even after they have served their full sentence, do not have the right to vote. Most of these laws were passed as part of the ‘black codes’ following the end of reconstruction.) Close to 60,000 eligible voters were illegally removed from the rolls prior to the 2000 election. An analysis of the list, completed after the election, showed that 95% of those removed were eligible under state law.

Vote-tampering happened on two levels. First, Republican operatives overseas manipulated absentee ballots, strong-arming officials into accepting ballots postmarked up to two weeks after election day. Second, unknown persons hacked into several electronic voting machines and removed over 16,000 votes that had been cast for Gore.

What made the 2000 election fundamentally different, however, was the use of extralegal terrorism against local election officials and those defending the right to vote. The best known example of this terrorism was the ‘mini-riot’ by paid Republican functionaries in Miami-Dade county, which led directly to the shutting down of a manual recount of the votes (in an area that traditionally votes overwhelmingly Democratic). Republican operatives, using private security firms as muscle, harassed and intimidated - and, on a couple of occasions, physically assaulted - pro-democracy activists that sought to challenge their attempted theft of the election.

Throughout the entire process, many pro-democracy activists were looking to the Democratic Party to live up to its name. However, the party leadership not only chose to accept the theft of the election: they brought pressure to bear against many of its more well known activists, including Jesse Jackson and Martin Luther King III.

This complete abrogation of basic democratic process by all the leading elements of the ruling class was unprecedented in American bourgeois democracy. Until 2000, whenever a similar crisis had reached its breaking point, there was always a section of the capitalists that, through its politicians in Congress and the White House, defended democratic norms - even if it was done in a partial or reactionary manner.

Today, close to four years after that break, four years after the death of the Second Republic, we have an electoral campaign that is a product of that process. It is little more than the vapour of ‘democracy’, well after the boiling point has been passed.