US On The Road To Fascism?

Date: Fri, 24 Nov 2000 08:58:57 -0800

World Socialist Web Site www.wsws.org


WSWS : News & Analysis : North America : US Elections

The Republican right prepares for violence

By the Editorial Board
24 November 2000

Back to screen version

The frenzied response of the Bush campaign and its allies in the media
to Tuesday's ruling by the
Florida Supreme Court has highlighted a political fact of immense
significance: the Republican Party
has become the organ of extreme right-wing forces that are prepared to
use extra-parliamentary
and violent methods to achieve their aims.

Spokesmen for George W. Bush and pro-Republican media outlets reacted to
the court's decision,
which simply affirmed the constitutional requirement that all votes be
fairly counted, with calls for
the Florida legislature to defy the court and appeals to the military of
a semi-insurrectionary
character.

The barrage of lies and misinformation—charging the court with “changing
the rules” and “rewriting
the election statutes,” denouncing Democratic candidate Al Gore as a
thug out to steal the election,
appealing to racist and anti-Semitic sentiments—had its intended effect.
On Wednesday morning a
mob of Bush supporters besieged the Miami/Dade County board of
canvassers, grabbing a
Democratic lawyer and threatening to assault those involved in manually
recounting the ballots. A
few hours later the Democratic-controlled board announced it was
abandoning its recount,
effectively disenfranchising hundreds of Gore supporters whose votes
were not registered in the
original machine tally.

The official responses of the Gore and Bush campaigns to the court
ruling provided a stark
contrast. Gore went on national television late Tuesday to appeal for a
show of national unity and a
public commitment by the Bush campaign to abide by the ultimate result
of the Florida recount.
Repeating his offer to meet with his Republican opponent, Gore spoke as
a bourgeois politician
worried over the prospect of an open breach within the political
establishment that could undermine
an orderly transfer of power, with unpredictable and potentially
explosive consequences.

Bush's representative, former Secretary of State James Baker, did not
even bother to acknowledge
Gore's appeals for unity or his offer to meet with the Texas governor.
Instead he denounced the
Supreme Court ruling as “unacceptable” and incited the
Republican-controlled state legislature to
defy the court, saying, “One should not now be surprised if the Florida
legislature seeks to affirm
the original rules.”

Baker was taking his cue from the Wall Street Journal, which had
editorialized in advance of the
court decision: “The legislature has an option, it seems to us a duty,
to make clear that it stands
ready to resolve any dispute between Mrs. Harris [the Republican
Secretary of State and co-chair
of the Bush campaign in Florida] and the Supreme Court Democrats. Since
the Republicans now
solidly control the legislature, they hold the winning hand.”

Paralleling its role in the impeachment conspiracy against Bill Clinton,
the Wall Street Journal has
served as the mouthpiece for the extreme-right forces that have sought
from election day on to
pollute public opinion with wild accusations and disinformation and
hijack the election for the
Republicans. It has spearheaded the effort to foster a veritable mutiny
within the military against a
possible Gore victory, using as the pretext the rejection of several
hundred legally deficient
absentee ballots from overseas military personnel.

On Wednesday the Journal carried an incendiary column entitled “The
Democratic Party's War on
the Military.” Calling the exclusion of the military ballots “one more
battle in the ongoing culture war
between the core of the Democratic Party and the US military,” the
column exuded racism,
homophobia and hatred for the working class. The author spoke of the
“twitching carcass” of the
Democratic Party's “left”—“teachers' unions, feminist activists, gay
victimologists, black churches,
faculty clubs.”

As the election crisis has progressed, thinly disguised appeals to
racism and anti-Semitism have
with increasing frequency appeared in the broadsides of Bush supporters.
Republican backers have
seized on the role of Jesse Jackson to whip up anti-black prejudice and
fastened on the large
number of Jewish retirees in Palm Beach to galvanize their
fundamentalist partisans.

The Journal has not refrained from such methods. In the editorial cited
above it employed loaded
terms to take a swipe at Florida's Jewish population, charging that Mrs.
Harris is “under fire for
being a Southern aristocrat rather than a New York sophisticate.” It
went on to denounce the
Democrats for “import[ing] Jesse Jackson for some race-baiting.”

The editorial as a whole was a call for the Republican Party to forego
traditional constitutional
restraints in its drive to capture the White House. It concluded with a
barely disguised injunction for
a victorious Bush campaign to fashion an administration along
authoritarian lines:

“The conventional wisdom is that if with this hassle Governor Bush does
become President he will
be a crippled one. Perhaps. But we find it equally plausible that facing
down the kind of assault
now being waged in Florida would be precisely the best preparation for
what may lie ahead. It is
Governor Bush's nature to extend the velvet glove, but he will be much
more successful if he and
his party can show that within it there is some steel.”

Significantly, the editorial was entitled “The Squeamish GOP?” The
Journal chooses its words
advisedly, in this case employing a term that connotes an aversion to
bloodshed. The meaning of
the newspaper's editors was unmistakable—a Republican president must be
prepared to use
violence and repression to impose its reactionary social agenda. Gaining
the White House by
suppressing votes and riding roughshod over the popular will is an
excellent preparation for dealing
with “what may lie ahead”—i.e., widespread popular opposition.

It is high time to stop masking the character of the Republican right
with the complacent term
“conservative.” These are fascistic elements who are breaking with the
traditional methods of
bourgeois democracy.

There is a logic to politics. Once influential sections of the ruling
elite conclude they cannot achieve
their aims through democratic means and take the path of conspiracy and
repression, they are well
on the way to civil war.

It is not here a matter of predicting the imminent imposition of a
military dictatorship. But it would
be the height of folly to ignore the signposts of such a danger looming
ahead. If the campaign the
Republicans are waging to gain the White House begins to resemble a
covert operation akin to
those mounted by the CIA against US imperialism's liberal and leftist
opponents in Latin
America—for example, in Chile—then it must follow that an option under
serious consideration is
the Pinochet solution. No one should doubt that Wall Street Journal
editor Robert Bartley and the
reactionaries on his staff are already working out the arguments to
justify the use of violence against
their political opponents and the working class.

The Wall Street Journal speaks for powerful sections of American big
business. These forces
within the financial elite have increasingly adopted the standpoint of
the extreme right, and
sponsored, financially and otherwise, the growth of this fascistic
element, precisely because they
have come to realize that they cannot impose their social agenda through
normal democratic
channels.

They rely on the right-wing rabble that populate the
corporate-controlled media to conceal their
anti-democratic aims and fill the airwaves with half-truths and lies.
Their strength does not lie in any
great popular support—on the contrary, their support in the general
population is marginal.

Rather, the strength of the Republican right consists in the fact that
it articulates more consistently
and uncompromisingly than any other bourgeois political grouping the
requirements of the American
corporate elite. The radical right knows what it wants and is prepared
to ride roughshod over
public opinion in order to get it. The Republicans do not play by the
normal constitutional rules,
while their bourgeois opponents in the Democratic Party wring their
hands as impotent and passive
onlookers. They embody a demoralized liberalism, whose watered-down
perspective of reform has
been discarded by the ruling class.

At the same time the Republican right senses that it has a narrow window
of opportunity for
realizing its ambitions. It was staggered by the results of the
election, which registered a victory in
the popular vote for Gore and, if the intent of Florida voters were
officially acknowledged, a
Democratic victory in the electoral vote as well. The combined vote for
Gore and Green Party
candidate Ralph Nader showed, broadly speaking, that a significant
majority of the electorate
supported policies of a liberal and leftist character, and opposed the
increasingly naked domination
of corporate power over American politics.

A look at the electoral map underscores the fact that the overall
trajectory of American society
does not favor the forces of the radical right. Bush piled up the vast
majority of his electoral votes in
the more backward and rural regions of the country—the South, the
Southwest, sections of the
Midwest. The more urbanized, industrialized, densely populated and
culturally vibrant regions went
for Gore. Within this general scheme, the decisive pro-Gore margin in
the popular vote was
provided by blacks and other highly oppressed sections of the working
class, whose vote
expressed deep distrust of the Republicans and a determination to defend
past gains in civil rights
and social conditions.

Moreover, the economic conditions fostering the rise of nouveau riche
layers that comprise a
critical component of the Republican right's social base are clearly
receding. The stock market
boom, based to a considerable extent on speculative capital, parasitism
and outright swindling, is
breaking up, leaving in its wake a society more economically polarized
than at any other period in
the past half-century, and a spectacle of corporate greed and
criminality of unprecedented
dimensions.

The response of the Republican right is growing hysteria. Its frenzy and
recklessness bespeak a
rebellion by a minority that feels it must stake all on immediate
victory, because its future prospects
are dwindling. The Republicans sense that the 2000 election is their
best, and perhaps last, chance
to seize hold of all the branches of government. If they lose the White
House, they face the
prospect of internal warfare and political disintegration.

Notwithstanding the many obvious differences, there are striking
parallels between the political
crisis arising from the 2000 election and the convulsive period that led
up to the Civil War of 1861.
One of these is the similarity in psychology and methods between the
Republican right of today and
the political representatives of the Southern slave owners 150 years
ago. In both cases, the most
reactionary social forces in the nation were driven by a sense of
desperation, arising from the fact
that the momentum of historical development was moving against them, to
employ the most
provocative and reckless methods.

One great difference, to extend the historical analogy, is the absence
within any faction of bourgeois
politics today of a force either willing or able to take on and defeat
the radical right. As they have
repeatedly demonstrated, the flaccid ranks of liberalism,
institutionalized in the Democratic Party,
are organically incapable of waging a serious struggle in defense of
democratic rights. That task
now falls to the working class, which must construct its own mass,
socialist party to carry it out.





                              Copyright 1998-2000
                            World Socialist Web Site
                              All rights reserved