Right surrounds Clinton
International Viewpoint #262 December 1994
A SLIGHTLY "left-of-centre"
President remains in office, but he has been left stranded by a right-wing landslide in the legislature. Bill Clinton and his Democratic Party are facing crisis and a real danger of decay. DAVID FINKEL tells us why.
T HE MOST alarming result
of the recent mid-term elections was the 3-2 vote by Californians in favour of a measure called Proposition 187. Its aim is to deny health and education services to illegal (mostly Mexican and Central American) immigrants and their children, and to compel workers in education, health care and social services to act as enforcers and informers.
However, at the same time the most hopeful sign was the defiant movement of resistance that erupted among California youth during the campaign. In the weeks before the vote, high school "blowouts" (mass student walk-outs) pledged defiance of any attempt by the state to victimise their immigrant classmates or themselves.
### Pressure
Groups of teachers, some of whom are activist veterans of the Central America solidarity struggles of the 1980s, have openly proclaimed their intention of non-compliance. Under the pressure of these mobilisations, California courts have halted implementation of Proposition 187 until its compatibility with Constitutional rights is "legally" tested. Nonetheless, the threat to basic democratic freedoms represented by the passage of this proposition is a serious warning of the battles which lie ahead.
The most important national electoral result, of course, is that the Republicans now take control not only of the Senate (an unsurprising result), but also of the larger House of Representatives, which the Democratic Party has continuously dominated since the middle of the Eisenhower administration of the
USA 1950s. This means that the Republican leadership now has the initiative on legislation. What this leadership, itself already divided, will do with this newly won power is now the leading subject of considerable speculation and internal
For its part, the Democratic Party may be irreparably damaged at a national level. It is of course too soon to draw such a conclusion as a matter of sober analysis. For one thing, bourgeois parties in many countries (and in Eastern Europe, even Communist ones!) have been destroyed in one election only to revive in the next. For another, the Democratic Party's bad fortunes could be reversed with the support of the 62% of the electorate - five in every eight potential voters! — who simply did not vote at all in this election. Nonetheless, the Democrats face an intractable obstacle to winning back majority support - in short, their own politics. Clinton and the Democrats, controlling the White House and both legislative chambers, promised significant reforms in health care, economic restructuring and "fairness". In two years they produced almost nothing, and in some cases — notably health care - worse than
Clinton has presided over one of the strangest economic "recoveries" on record, one in which the central bank (called the Federal Reserve) has continually raised interest rates in a deliberate policy to prevent official unemployment from falling below six percent. A populist president could have gained considerable sympathy by publicly attacking this fantastically reactionary monetary policy, but Clinton (true to his corporate loyalties above all else has bowed to the discipline of the bond markets.
Since two structural constants on the U.S. economy are that i) real unemployment is about twice the official figure and; ii) Black unemployment is almost exactly twice the national average; this policy means that African-Americans are trapped in real unemployment well over 20 percent. Clinton's response to this catastrophe has consisted mainly in calling for "stronger families" and for "welfare reform" which is intended mainly to deprive single mothers of minimal support. He has also declared an "open mind" on re-introducing prayer into State-funded schools, and taken credit for the passage of a hideous "anti-crime" bill which will vastly increase the prison population.
Clinton's original proposals for economic stimulus and "job creation", dubious enough to begin with, were whittled down to almost nothing by the manipulation of Republicans and rightwing members of Clinton's own formal Democratic majority. Practically all semblance of party discipline (which is in any case uniquely weak in the US political system) collapsed long ago. The North American Free Trade Agreement - roundly opposed by organised labour and indeed by most of the Democrats' electoral supporters — was ratified only with the support of many Republican congressmen, reflecting the overriding reality that the corporate ruling class categorically demanded its passage.
### Bleak
The Democratic Party faces extraordinarily bleak perspectives in the face of the 1996 presidential election. Clinton appears, at this moment, absolutely unelectable unless the Republicans commit the highly unlikely blunder of nominating a candidate from the extreme religious right-wing of their party. He could, of course, be persuaded not to run for re-election. But in the US, unlike European parliamentary democracies where getting rid of an unviable party leader (as was the case with Margaret Thatcher in Britain) is relatively easy, an open struggle to replace Clinton as presidential candidate for a second term would produce massive convulsions in an already weakened party.
So long as the Democrats seemed to enjoy a permanent Congressional majority, corporate campaign contributions rolled into their coffers more than to the Republicans. In the past half- year, however, as Democratic fortunes sank, this trend has reversed. Corporate capital now appears to look to the Republican Party as its governing party of choice at both the executive and legislative levels.
How then will the Republicans use their Congressional power against a nearly crippled President? Some of its
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Right surrounds Clinton
International Viewpoint #262 December 1994 leaders, most prominently the new Speaker of the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, are committed ideologically to a hard-right political and cultural offensive, including sweeping elimination of welfare, cutting off billions of dollars in federal aid to big cities, and tax cuts for the affluent, a measure that can only increase the severe fiscal crisis of the State. These measures (and much other nonsense) are embedded in the so-called "Contract With America" which the Republicans promoted in the final weeks of the campaign.
The religious right, deeply implanted in a growing number of city and town local administrations, will press for large-scale assaults on abortion and gay rights. That kind of campaign, however, could severely backfire - it does not correspond to what the majority of people who voted Republican thought they were voting for in this election. In Oregon, for example, where right-wing forces are well organised and heavily financed, anti-gay ballot proposals failed.
### Explosive
Republican centre-right leaders, like Senate Republican leader Robert Dole, will seek as much as possible to avoid confrontations on such explosive issues, pursuing instead an agenda of tax cutting and so-called government "downsizing", except of course for increasing government subsidies of corporations and particularly military spending (another move which can only make the deficit worse). Most of the downsizing will be done with mirrors; few Republican politicians have any serious intention of undertaking politically disastrous assaults on old-age pensions (social security, for example.
"Making government smaller", according to established wisdom, was the mandate handed to the Republicans by an angry electorate. Closer inspection reveals instead an overriding political alienation. White working class voters who in 1992 backed the billionaire political maverick Ross Perot as their presidential candidate, while sticking with the Democrats for Congress, tended this time to simply stay home. The election 28 was, by US standards, highly ideological
— not in itself a bad thing, of course — yet at the same time amazingly devoid of substance and filled with vicious personal attacks, largely because the entire left side of the debate was missing.
With the Democrats in collapse, and with Democratic Party liberals in particular having long ago abandoned even that label, official political debate in the United States — even within the bourgeois political spectrum — is largely reduced to a dialogue of the right wing with itself, broadcast to the intellectual elites via the "quality" press and to the white male "mainstream" by way of the ubiquitous talk-shows on radio.
Where does the left stand in all this?
We face a period in which the right wing will officially set the political and social agenda. American politics will take on a very nasty quality. The trade union movement is weaker than at any point since the rise of the CIO trade union federation almost sixty years ago. The main Black civil rights organizations are in internal crisis and, in the case of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People, extreme financial difficulty. Social resistance is fragmented and not well organised, although the California student mobilisations show that it can be exploSIve
Dissipated
The momentum which existed inside the Democratic Party in the 1984 and 1988 elections for Jesse Jackson's "Rainbow" campaigns has dissipated. Those on the left who pinned their hopes on changing the Party through those campaigns have been bitterly disappointed. It is extremely unlikely that the Democrats' defeat will strengthen any leftward impulse within it now.
It would also be absurd and selfdeceiving to pretend that the Democrats' stunning defeat will bring in its wake a massive working class response for an independent labour party. Any such claims may be safely discounted.
There is, however, a profound political vacuum which the left could begin to fill, beginning at the local level. A small but significant initiative within the labour movement called Labor Party Advocates, organised by Tony Mazzocchi, an official of the Oil Chemical and Atomic Workers (OCAW), is officially backed by OCAW and has recently won the support of one railway workers'
Green party candidates did reasonably well in several states, including New Mexico, hardly a left stronghold. The New Progressive Party in Wisconsin successfully retained its ballot status. The only independent socialist congressman, Bernie Sanders from Vermont, won re-election. Under conditions of a right-wing sweep, this must be considered a significant victory for the left, although Sanders has been justifiably criticised in left papers for his decision to vote for Clinton's hideous crime bill
Whatever potential exists for a left revival can be realised only by making a decisive break from the Democratic Party — now. *