The “I” Word Surfaces: New Openings and New Challenges

Revolution #030, January 15, 2006, posted at revcom.us

In late December, talk of impeaching Bush suddenly broke into the
mainstream media. From the conservative financial paper Barron’s (which
said that “willful disregard of a law is potentially an impeachable
offense”) to Newsweek and beyond, the question flared. Democratic
Senator Barbara Boxer asked constitutional scholars to look into it.
John Dean, the former lawyer of Richard Nixon (who was the last
president forced out of office), wrote that Bush is “the first
president to admit to an impeachable offense”–referring to Bush’s
admission that he broke the law in order to spy on U.S. citizens.

The clamor around impeachment opens up an important but complex opportunity for those working to drive out the Bush regime–but only if it is aggressively seized upon. How to do that is a huge and consequential question for the movement.

Why Now?

Despite Bush’s wholesale violations of the Constitution, which are
all grounds for impeachment, the Democrats have basically given Bush a
free hand to implement the main parts of his program. So why has
impeachment suddenly become a “legitimate” topic of discussion?

To begin with, the war in Iraq has continued to go badly from the
imperialist standpoint. Other forces in the ruling class are worried
that the war could develop into a major strategic disaster for
imperialism, and they are not that impressed with either the Iraq
elections in December or Bush’s recent public relations offensive to
“re-sell” the war. They aim to pressure Bush–not to end the war, but
to fight it “more effectively.”

On top of that comes the current spying scandal, in which the Bush regime broke the rules of how the ruling class of imperialists–whom the top Republicans and Democrats both fundamentally represent–settle conflicts among themselves. Things like spying are supposed to be closely regulated– not
to protect the rights of the people, but to make sure that one section
of imperialists doesn’t turn the powerful weapons of state repression
against another.

But Bush violated this, and some Democrats then raised
impeachment in part to warn Bush to back off. Bush shot right back,
attacking his critics for “aiding the enemy.” Howard Fineman, the
Newsweek and MSNBC correspondent, warned that, “We are entering a dark
time in which the central argument advanced by each party is going to
involve accusing the other party of committing what amounts to treason.
Democrats will accuse the Bush administration of destroying the
Constitution; Republicans will accuse the Dems of destroying our
security.”

Fineman is saying something fairly extreme here; but whether you see
such a time as “dark” depends on where you stand in the system and what
you do about it. Such conflict at the top can create further openings
for revolutionary and progressive political forces: more exposures of
what goes on behind the scenes come to light and more people awaken to
political life and, potentially, struggle. At its most extreme, the
legitimacy of the system itself may be brought into question. So it may
not be bad when thieves fall out, not bad at all . . . if their victims seize on it to do something good.

Masses Demand “Regime Change”

Which leads to the next point. Besides the conflict at the top,
there has also been a movement from below forcing the question of
“regime change” into the open. This happened in a significant, if still
beginning way, with the demonstrations of thousands on November 2. It
took a further step with the publication in the New York Times of the
Call to drive out the Bush regime, and specifically to demonstrate on
January 31 and February 4, on the occasion of the State of the Union
speech, to demand that “Bush Step Down.” The organized mass upsurge to
drive out the regime, along with the still unorganized but widespread
and increasingly intense mass anger against Bush and the yearning to
see him go, has been another important factor forcing the hand of
Democratic Party leaders.

This upsurge “from below” closely interpenetrates with and
influences the struggle “at the top.” But the two struggles are NOT one
and the same. These are two distinct dynamics. The masses want the Bush
regime to go; yesterday is not soon enough for millions of people in
this country. The Democratic leaders, on the other hand, want to rein
in both Bush . . . and the masses who hate Bush.

In “The Pyramid of Power and the Struggle to Turn This Whole Thing Upside Down,”
Bob Avakian writes that the social base of the Democratic Party are
“the people who stand for progressive kinds of things, all the people
who are oppressed in this society. For the Democrats, a big part of
their role is to keep all those people confined within the bourgeois,
the mainstream, electoral process. . . and to get them back into it
when they have drifted away from–or broken out of–that framework . .
. The last thing in the world [the Democratic leaders] want to do is to
call these masses of people into the streets to protest or to battle
against this right-wing force that’s being built up.” [Bob Avakian, The Coming Civil War and Repolarization for Revolution in the Present Era (Chicago: RCP Publications, 2005), p. 3.]

Once in the streets, so to speak, people may get a sense of their
own potential power and come to think more deeply and critically about
things they may have taken for granted about society. They may check
out and turn to different kinds of leadership, and broaden their
horizons–and demands–still further, and in the process attract still
greater forces to their banner. They may, if they fight hard enough and
conditions come together in the right way, actually win the battle, and
in so doing they may change the direction of society and open up the
prospect and opportunity for a whole different future.

That may be a very exciting vision for you and me, but it is
anathema to the top Democrats, whose interests lie, above all else, in
defending the imperialist status quo. So the feelers around impeachment
coming from Democratic leaders represent not only “a shot across the
bow” to Bush, but also an attempt to rope in the anti-Bush sentiment coming from below and to control and deflect that sentiment.

But again, this is complex. A senator like Boxer who raises the
question of impeachment–even though she intends in large part to draw
people back into the narrow and killing confines of
politics-as-usual–can, despite herself, end up adding to the
“legitimacy” of the demand and encouraging people to step into
political life. It’s a double-edged sword, one that can ultimately
swing against either the ruling class. . . or the people. The question
is who grasps it, and from what end.

Waiting for November Won’t Do!

One negative tendency in the current mix is an attempt to focus
those who want impeachment on “getting out the vote in November” in a
way that ignores or downplays the need to act in the streets now. A
recent blog entry by a prominent liberal writer surveys the eruption of
impeachment controversy into the media, notes the wide range of
offenses for which Bush could be impeached, and concludes by . . .
calling on people to help “the Democrats regain control of Congress in
’06.” Even worse, in an entire essay devoted to the topic of
impeachment, the writer does not even mention the November 2
demonstrations; the Times ad and the controversy that resulted from it;
other important statements in support of the World Can’t Wait movement
from a range of people; or the organizing for the January 31 and
February 4 outpourings that is now under way.

Look: there will be no impeachment without mass upsurge.
Even if you pin your hopes on the top Democrats for this, you have to
recognize that they will not act unless and until they fear that their
base is getting beyond their control. By the same token, any strategy
that deflects people from taking action NOW in the name of “working
(and essentially waiting) for November,” will give Bush the time and
political space to carry out and consolidate still more outrages,
around the world and within the U.S. That would be unconscionable in
any circumstance, and all the more so in a time when yesterday’s
unprecedented outrages become tomorrow’s new norms.

Part of the danger in this “wait for November” orientation is that
the terms on which people have entered the movement will change,
imperceptibly but very rapidly: it will go from impeaching Bush, to
winning over this or that congressman, to at least electing a Democrat
(no matter what their program), and so on. Such an orientation,
whatever the intentions of some of those who espouse or take it up,
will allow Bush to deflate the opposition to him, both through
repression and “spin.” On that trajectory, by November Bush would have
the apparatus of the right-wing media, the rigged voting districts, his
huge Christian fascist “get-out-the-vote” operation, and the whole
crooked voting machine thing going for him; people would be playing his
game, on his court, with his referees. Far better to be in a position
where a mass movement has been raging throughout society demanding that
Bush step down, where people from all walks of life are breaking loose
in their thinking and actions from the current suffocating atmosphere,
or even where the strength of such a movement has already forced Bush
out!

And by the way, that can be done–even without a
Democratic Congress. After all, who controlled the Congress when the
Democrat Lyndon Johnson was forced to essentially step down? The
Democrats. And who uttered the famous words “what did the president
know and when did he know it”–seen now as the decisive turn in
Congress leading to the Republican Richard Nixon’s resignation? A
Republican senator, Howard Baker. As these examples illustrate, the
imperialists who really rule America do not make critical decisions
based on elections, but on whether a particular president has, all in
all, become too great a political liability to what they perceive as
their overall interests–and that very much includes whether the
actions of such a president and their effect on the masses is calling
the legitimacy of the whole thing into question.

How the Bush regime gets driven out can’t be predicted. But the only way that any of it–impeachment, resignation, whatever– will
happen is if everyone who cannot stand both the terrible outrages the
regime has committed and the still more deadly future that it is
hammering into place joins together in independent mass action NOW. To
those who really want to see Bush impeached, to everyone who
wants to see him go: your energy and effort right now needs to go into
the push for truly massive actions around the State of the Union.

There is no magic pendulum; there is no savior that will come; there
is no check or balance that will, at the eleventh hour, assert itself.
There is only the people, and their capacity to act in their own
interests and build up their own organizations, with the urgency and
determination that this crossroads in history requires. That, and that
alone, can change the course of history.