The boneheads have it. And what is truly frightening is that — in marked contrast with the last United States election — the boneheads have it by a clear majority. Despite the developing disaster in Iraq, the tattered state of trans-Atlantic relations and the perception among 70% of American voters that the US economy is in a mess, George W Bush has the most ringing electoral endorsement since the Reagan years.
Bush’s clear popular mandate, combined with Republican control of the Senate and the House of Representatives, has implications that extend well beyond the four years of his second term. With one Supreme Court judge gravely ill and seven others of advanced years, Bush could soon be in position to put his radical right stamp on this arbiter of the Constitution and a key force in shaping the ideological climate in the US. As judges are appointed for life, the effects will be felt long after Bush himself has stepped down from the political stage.
It would be wrong to see in Tuesday’s election a temporary and aberrant response to the events of September 11 2001. What we are witnessing is the decline of liberal/left politics and its traditional standard-bearer, the Democratic Party, in the US. There are clear socio-economic reasons for this, principally including the decline of smoke-stack industry and the steady erosion of labour’s historic support for the Democrats. Bush is pre-eminently the candidate of white working class men. According to Democratic pollster Mark Penn, white male support for the Democratic Party has plunged by 16 percentage points in the aftermath of Bill Clinton’s presidency.
Since the Barry Goldwater years, the radical right has studiously built what The New York Times describes as a “message machine” that spends more than $300-million a year pushing its agenda. There has been no pandering to the liberal Republicanism once personified by Nelson Rockefeller and New York mayor John Lindsay. The appeal is to hard-core right-wingers, particularly of the evangelical Christian stripe, on moral issues like abortion, homosexual marriage, stem-cell research and religious instruction in schools. The aim — much accelerated during Bush’s first term — is to blur the constitutional divide between church and state and shift the US towards outright theocracy.
Since 2000 Republicans have also sought to rival the Democrats as the party with the grass roots networks to mobilise supporters on polling day. This is no conspiracy of big capital. It is a genuinely popular movement that reflects the visceral superstitions and ideological hatreds of vast numbers of middle Americans in the south and west of the country. The mobilisation of fundamentalist Christians in unprecedented numbers appears to have been the key reason for Bush’s much improved electoral showing. The “Silent Majority” of Nixon’s vice-president, Spiro Agnew, has found its voice.
Economic polarisation
The only possible response is for progressive people in the US to begin patiently rebuilding their movement, using the same message machine and forms of mobilisation at the grass roots. Ordinary Americans, particularly those in the “red” states, have to be systematically exposed to such issues as the potential benefits of stem-cell research, Republican failures on health and child care, and the dangers of Republican plans to privatise social security. American youth, in particular, must be ceaselessly reminded of the erosion of civil rights under Bush. The first Bush term, with its tax cuts for the rich and net job destruction, saw mounting economic polarisation in the US. As this will almost certainly intensify over the next four years there will be opportunities to rally America’s new jobless and new poor.
Critically, Americans have to be made aware of their responsibilities to the wider world whose destiny they control. This week presented the bizarre spectacle of an election for what is effectively the world’s government by millions of people who know nothing, and care even less, about the planet and its concerns. Progressive Americans must hammer home the message that the US is not an “island of itself” that can remain indefinitely unscathed by growing geopolitical instability, deepening Third World economic distress, rising global anti-Americanism and destruction of the global environment, including rampant climate change.
South Africans may feel themselves powerless in the face of an America that has given the rigid finger to the billions beyond its borders — but their approach can only be, in the environmental formulation, to “think global, act local”. Individuals in the private sphere, and politicians in the public sphere, must seize every opportunity to build international solidarity, advance the cause of multilateral decision-making and raise the clamour for global economic justice and responsible management of the world’s resources. The hope must be that the totality of dissenting and admonitory voices, both individually and channelled through multilateral vehicles like the United Nations, the Non-Aligned Movement, the Commonwealth and the World Social Forum, will break through the US’s chronic hearing disorder.
Somehow the xenophobes, blinkered superpatriots and Christian bigots who re-elected George Bush must be made to see that there is one world and one human species, whose interdependence is growing. We stand or fall together.