 Right-wing forces whipped up anti-gay bigotry by attacking same-sex marriages. Photo: Bill Hackwell |
Relying on the Democrats in Congress to stop the right will surely fail. When Newt Gingrich in 1995 introduced the so-called Contract With America—a precursor to today’s assault by Corporate America—Clinton and the Democrats merely co-opted essential features of the Republican program, for example, by abolishing welfare.
But Bush and the ultra-right agenda can be defeated. The outcome of this battle will be determined by the ability to mobilize the united resistance of the working class and all those who are the targets of bigotry.
While the “political backwardness of the American people” is not exactly a new concept, the 2004 election victory for Bush and the Republicans did not show that the U.S. workers are “moving backward,” as some liberal pundits now whine. Far from it. The elections have shown the political bankruptcy of the very pundits that preached putting aside the mass struggle in favor of the tepid Kerry candidacy.
The Bush government and the Christian Right concealed its core objectives from a significant part of its electoral base. For instance, it appealed to elderly working class Christians to vote for “strong, moral leadership,” and in opposition to “gay marriage” and “abortion” as a means to hide from them that Bush intends to shred the social security checks that these same people rely on each month. Instead of exposing this right-wing trick, Kerry simply caved, announcing that he too opposed gay marriage. Refusing to openly defend equal-marriage rights, the Democratic leadership headed for the sidelines, giving the Republicans and the Christian Right free reign in mobilizing the “church vote” in eleven states that voted on referendums outlawing marriage rights for gay and lesbian people. Pandering to bigotry only helps bigotry swell.
Bush now intends to try to overturn the social and economic achievements of past decades, to rip apart the last vestiges of the New Deal reforms that provided new rights for working people at the expense of Big Business. At the very moment that wages are being driven down and workers are losing health care benefits, the Bush administration in tends to steal trillions of dollars from Social Security, handing that money over to Wall Street banks and corporations. Women’s rights to control their own body are on the chopping block, along with access to health care. The right wing is determined to succeed.
Going into the election, Bush had a 44 percent disapproval rating. The war in Iraq has been shown to be based on lies, and is costing more in terms of money and lives every day. How could the Democratic Party have lost?
The “backward worker” syndrome
The most common explanation for the Democrat’s loss is on the “backwardness” of the “red states,” which outnumbers and outvotes the “enlightenment” of the “blue states.” This myth is peddled by liberal pundits whose main goal is to absolve the Democratic Party of responsibility for Kerry’s loss.
Katha Pollit promotes this view in a doom and gloom piece called “Mourn” in the Nov. 22 issue of the liberal magazine The Nation. “Maybe this time the voters chose what they want,” she wrote. “Nationalism, pre-emptive war, order not justice, ‘safety’ through torture, backlash against women and gays, a gulf between haves and have-nots, government largesse for their churches and a my-way-or-the-highway President. Where, I wonder, does that leave us?”
Pollit, crestfallen over Kerry’s bad showing, echoes many saddened intellectuals who feel let down by “the people.” But these worshipers at the altar of conventional wisdom have drawn all the wrong lessons from the presidential election.
As to the purported “backward vs. enlightened” view, the facts just don’t bear this out. While much is made of the 22 percent of voters who cited “moral values” as their main concern, the same polls offer no evidence that the majority of people are reactionary. In fact, in some cases the contrary is true.
The same exit polls that showed the “moral values” vote show that 60 percent of voters support the right of same-sex couples to either legally marry or have legal civil unions. Only 37 percent opposed any legal recognition for gay and lesbian couples. Ten years ago, the concept of civil unions was considered “outside the mainstream” and gay marriage was not on the political agenda at all.
Fifty-five percent of all voters also supported abortion rights, with 21 percent saying abortion should be “always legal” and 34 percent saying abortion should be “mostly legal.”
Several “red” states where majorities voted for Bush ap proved minimum wage referenda passed overwhelmingly. Sixty-nine percent of Nevada voters ap proved raising the minimum wage; 71 percent approved of a similar measure in Florida.
Despite all these facts, a majority voted for Bush—including one in every four voters who believed abortion should always be legal and 52 percent of those who favored civil unions for gay couples.
 Photo: Tim Sloan |
It is important to point out that these polls of voters only provide a skewed view of the U.S. population as a whole. Although the voter turnout was high compared to recent elections, 40 percent of eligible voters stayed home—somewhere on the order of 80 million people.
One revealing figure in the exit poll data was that nationwide, 55 percent of the voters earned over $50,000 a year. Across the population, half the population has a household income of $43,000 or less. That means that by and large, lower and middle income workers voted less.
This figure is nearly across the board. In higher-income New York, the figure was 64 percent earning over $50,000 while in South Carolina 53 percent earned over $50,000. In poorer states like Arkansas and Mississippi, where the median income is closer to $32,000, still some 40 percent earned over $50,000.
What stands out in all this is that while the election was touted as “the most important of a lifetime,” for millions of people—especially poor and working people—neither candidacy provided any sense of urgency.
Still, influential sectors of the anti-war and labor movements put a huge amount of capital—politically and financially—into the Kerry campaign. Thousands of progressive people put hundreds of thousands of hours into knocking on doors and making phone calls, convinced that this was their best chance to fight the right. What went wrong?
The fundamental problem facing the Democratic Party is that it is a ruling class party which seeks to have a voting base among the labor movement and African Ameri can population. Its program must at the same time serve the interests of the ruling class while appealing to progressive voters. That task has grown more and more difficult as the needs of the ruling class have grown more voracious, both in the U.S. and around the world.
The capitalist establishment—the banks and corporations—has been waging a decades-long effort to eliminate the “social wage” of the U.S. working class. It seeks to free corporate America from any responsibility to pay into Social Security and private pensions, unemployment insurance, welfare, Medicare, Medicaid, and every other program that includes a contribution from the corporate bosses. It considers these social programs—which were a by-product of the workers struggle in the 1930s and the mass civil rights movement of the 1960s—to be a form of theft by the people from “their” profits.
And of course, it is driven to pursue its imperial ambitions around the globe. Both parties must pledge allegiance to those ambitions.
The vast antiwar movement that rose up in response to the war in Iraq posed a special problem for the ruling class—and for the Democratic Party in particular. The Democratic Party voting base is against the war, with wide layers having taken to the streets to oppose it and millions more gaining confidence from the antiwar movement. But the ruling class that the Democratic Party leadership serves is committed to “winning the war” in Iraq.
That split between the needs of the ruling class and the hopes and aspirations of millions of workers is the political basis for Kerry’s “waffling.” Far from being an individual character trait, it is a symptom of the problem that the Democratic Party faces as a ruling class party.
Fighting back
Any strategy to fight back the ruling class effort to carry out a virtual counterrevolution against the social gains of the 1930s and 1960s must start from this understanding: the Democratic Party is as incapable of stopping the coming rightwing offensive as they were of winning an election against a President.
The Democratic Party absolutely can’t beat the right wing movement. It serves the same master: Big Money, Big Banks, and Big Oil. The Republican Party and the so-called Christian Right are political appendages of the capitalist corporations, energy and oil monopolies, and military corporations.
The Democratic Party cannot appeal to the broad working class—Black, Latino, white, women and men, gay or straight—precisely because it serves the same interests as the Republicans. It will try to “move to the center” in its never-ending quest to prove its loyalty to big business.
What is urgently needed in the face of the right-wing offensive is a clear appeal for united mass action by the labor and antiwar movements, by the LGBT community, by the African American and Latino communities, the besieged Arab and Muslim people, the seniors on Social Security and the next generations that will have their rights stripped away. What is needed is the forging of a new country-wide united front. To fight the right, to stop the bigots and their backers in the economic and political plutocracy there must be unity in action and in struggle. A new movement must and will be built that is politically conscious, independent and ready to do battle against the right-wing offensive.
