04.11.2004

View from the US left

Martin Schreader, editor of Appeal to Reason, paper of the revolutionary Debs faction of the Socialist Party US

As I write these lines, it is 4.30am on the morning after election day. I would like to be able to report for sure who will be the chief executive of the United States for the next four years, but I cannot. Currently, it appears that the presidential election is, once again, being determined by the outcome in one relatively populous state. In this case it is the midwestern state of Ohio.

With almost all of the precincts reporting in, George W Bush has a lead in the state of about 145,000 votes. However, there are over 185,000 so-called ‘provisional ballots’ (ballots cast by eligible voters who were not listed on the voter rolls). It is expected that Democratic challenger John Kerry will have the vote of the majority of those ballots, but it is extremely doubtful whether that will be enough to win. Frankly, I expect Kerry to concede defeat sometime this afternoon.

Nevertheless, the overarching backdrop to this election has been a fundamental shift away from democratic norms and principles - both on the part of the two main capitalist parties, but also among many voters.

This author spent most of election day working for the poll monitoring organisation, Election Protection. Throughout the day, reports came in documenting instances of Republican operatives challenging every ballot cast in poor and African American precincts, polling places mysteriously losing electricity just before they were about to begin taking voters, shortages of ballots at several precincts, and even instances of physical clashes. And this was just in Detroit.

According to Indymedia, instances of voter disenfranchisement and fraud have been filed in at least a dozen states, including the ‘battleground states’ of Michigan, Ohio and Florida. In several states, people forced to use electronic voting machines reported irregularities, including many machines registering their votes for Kerry as votes for Bush. However, because these machines do not provide paper receipts, there is no way to submit a corrected vote.

But these instances of disenfranchisement are only half of the story. Both capitalist parties have turned to using fraud as an ostensibly legitimate tool in an election. For the Republicans, the tested tactics (listed above) of keeping workers and oppressed people from the polls were the weapons of choice. For the Democrats, it was the more savvy scare tactic embodied in the mantra of ‘anybody but Bush’, which was used to marginalise and demonise other political parties participating in the election (and if that did not work, then they resorted to the tactics of their counterparts).

Between these two efforts, it is beyond the ability of any thinking person to see this election as anything but undemocratic and illegitimate.

But the problems go deeper. The other side of this election’s anti-democratic shift can be seen in the progress of the so-called ‘culture war’. In all 11 states where they appeared, ballot initiatives that would ban same-sex marriage passed by large majorities. Here in Michigan, the ballot initiative not only amended the state’s constitution to restrict marriage, but also banned “similar unions” like domestic partnerships, which many labour unions fought to include in their contracts.

Certainly, the responsibility for this shift can be primarily laid at the feet of arch-reactionary and fascistic forces operating within mainstream structures. But a share of the responsibility can also be pinned on both the ‘liberals’, who, as rightwing politicians and the media targeted them, scrambled for cover, and the radical left, who have chosen to avoid a hard fight against the ‘cultural warriors’. These criminal abdications and betrayals have only aided the reactionary drive, without regard to the broader constitutional implications of these new laws.

Until today, it remained something of a question whether or not the people of the United States would use the ballot as a means of demonstrating their desire to maintain nominally democratic norms. As it stands right now, the question has been answered ... in the negative. The combined power of the corporate media, the corporate parties (and their corporatised labour unions) and a contrived ‘culture of fear’ have turned the average American voter into a Pavlovian nightmare. The end result has been that the Bush regime, which came to power through a bloodless coup d’etat in 2000, has now been effectively legitimised through a large ‘vote of confidence’ by over 50 million Americans.
A plurality of Americans has, through their votes, chosen to approve the burial of the second republic in favour of imperialist empire. Their legitimising of the Bush regime and their support for the ‘culture war’ has irreversibly broken the continuity of American democracy. The process of Weimarisation is complete.

Certain wooden-headed elements of the left will, of course, continue to assert that little, if anything, new has happened as a result of this election. They will continue to see the old institutional facades in place and will impressionistically conclude that all talk of a new period in American history as delusional. They will note that the uniquely American brand of anti-democratic, anti-worker corporatism that has taken hold in Washington does not correspond to what they read in history books and vulgarly conclude that nothing has really changed. In this author’s view, these are little more than the echoes of the past and should be treated as such.

It is time for class-conscious working people, revolutionary socialists and communists to face forward and begin to come to grips with the new situation confronting us. Working class unity will have to take as its starting point the development of a common assessment of this situation and the revolutionary democratic tasks that inevitably flow from it. Left unity - if such a thing is still possible - will have to be its by-product.

Today, I mourn the failure of the 215-year-old ‘noble experiment’. The republic is dead: long live the republic!