In the week or so after
the election, for many it felt like Oz in the U.S.-the part when
everyone sings “Ding Dong the Wicked Witch Is Dead.” People talked
about how they could breathe again. I have a friend who attended a Move
On party with the World Can’t Wait leaflet on the elections. She talked
with the young hostess-someone who”d never been politically active
before and who described her feelings about winning as so intense it
was almost like falling in love” until my friend broke her the news
that the candidates had not opposed the Military Commissions Act and
that everything she saw at Abu Ghraib is now legal and legitimate.
It
was that kind of week. Just when people expected to see the witch’s
legs curled up under the house, the fantasy was rudely interrupted.
Millions wanted-and wished-these elections to signal a stop to the kind
of certifiable lunacy that has already gone way too far to the kind of
future that nobody should want to live in. Instead, the Democrats are
all about finding common ground and making nice. Being “uniters and not
dividers” with the very people who have cast even mild opposition to
the war or torture from their ranks with accusations-sometimes veiled
and often not-of treason. The very idea of impeachment is being shot
down by leading Democrats as divisive-they have come to Washington to
show they can govern and work in a bi-partisan manner to unite the
country and work with the President.
Contrast that to
what happened when the Republicans got hold of a majority of Congress
in 1994-they ushered in the “Gingrich revolution” and went on the
offensive. Four years later they impeached a president for a sexual
scandal, and two years after that they stole an election for another
president who believed-and believes-he’s on a “mission from God.” They
ushered in what few took seriously and most people thought impossible
in the United States-Dominionists, Theocrats & Televangelists with
hundreds of government appointments, veto power over Supreme Court
nominees, and weekly access into the highest offices of the land. And
if you thought the elections might slow the wanna-be messiah down-on
November 17, George W. Bush appointed a director of an organization
that opposes pre-marital sex, contraception, and abortion to head the
federally funded teen pregnancy, family planning, and abstinence
program.
Premature Political Obituaries
Those
who proclaim that the time of the Christian Right is over are
dangerously deluding themselves, and others. As David Kuo, the
disillusioned former deputy director of Bush’s faith-based initiatives,
put it in a recent New York Times op-ed, “Since 1992, every
national Republican electoral defeat has been accompanied by an
obituary for the religious right. Every one of these obituaries has
been premature-after these losses the religious right only grew
stronger.” Jesus was resurrected only once. The religious right has
been resurrected twice in just the past 15 years.” The fact is that the
Christian Fascist movement arose on the basis of deep economic and
social dynamics in the U.S. It draws on spontaneous currents within
American cultural life, but it has also been molded and shaped by
ruling class operatives as a strategic way to deal with their political needs in this period. It is not going to blow away like dandelion fluff in the face of an election, as Kuo points out.
Question:
who is still setting the moral initiative when the strategy of the
Democratic leaders was to run candidates on the intolerant and ignorant
Republican view of morality? Or when Chuck Schumer and Rahm Emanuel are
hailed as the “architects of Democratic victory” for packing the ticket
with anti-choice candidates and refusing to touch the hate-mongering
referendums aimed at gay marriage? You can hail the first woman speaker
of the House all you want, but it’s as hollow as Condi if this is what
is being crammed into people’s heads and legitimized.
A chilling and very important article in the November 27 Nation, “Arrows for the War”
by Kathryn Joyce, reports on the “Quiverfull movement.” The movement
borrows its name from Psalm 127: “Like arrows in the hands of a warrior
are sons born in one’s youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full
of them. They will not be put to shame when they contend with their
enemies in the gate.” Quiverfull mothers think of their children as no
mere movement, but as an army they”re building for God, seeing all this
very much in the context of a possible Armageddon that would wipe the
global slate clean for Christians. Quiverfull parents try to have
upwards of six children. They home-school their families, attend
fundamentalist churches and follow biblical guidelines of male
headship-“Father knows best”-and female submissiveness. They refuse any
attempt to regulate pregnancy. Many openly promote patriarchy-yes,
literally so. Joyce also writes that within the Quiverfull movement,
“The motivations aren’t always racist, but the subtext of “race
suicide” is often there.”
But what should really be noted
is the way that one Philip Longman has both endorsed works of the more
explicitly Christian Fascist wing of the movement and also written for
the Democratic Leadership Council on how to move the party to a
“radical middle.” “Who are these evangelicals?” asks Longman. “Is there
anything about them that makes them inherently prowar and for tax cuts
for the rich?” No, he concludes. “What’s irreducible about these
religious voters is that they”re for the family.” Asked whether the
absolutist position Quiverfull takes on birth control, let alone
abortion, might interfere with his strategy, Longman admits that
abortion rights would have to take a back seat but that, in politics,
“nobody ever gets everything they need.”
With this logic,
to paraphrase World Can’t Wait, you are going to have to learn-or be
forced-to accept the literal biblical teaching on the family-one that
is based on restoring the position of man as the God-given authority
over family and society.
“War On Terror”-Still in Effect
Throughout
the campaign, and now since the election, the Democrats have accepted
and promoted the Republican logic of the “War on Terror,” and the even
deeper, more underlying premise that America should
strategically dominate the Middle East, through military power and its
client state Israel. Based on this, even the demands of some Democrats
last week for “phased withdrawals” are little more than positioning in
a process of forging a new consensus on what to do in Iraq, one that
for now is based on the view that, in accord with continued and
intensified strategic domination, the U.S. cannot afford a strategic
debacle, or even the perception of defeat, in Iraq. [See “The Crossroads in Iraq: Why The U.S. Went to War“]
And just as obituaries for the Christian Fascists are ridiculously
premature, so too with the neocons-these people are still in the
executive branch and they are still fighting for their position.
When
Nancy Pelosi says, now that we”re elected we have to “govern from the
center,” she means that the Democrats will not seriously challenge the
theocratic thrust represented by forces around and high up in the Bush
regime. In reality, she is effectively giving support to the call from
many Democratic theoreticians to embrace, or at least conciliate
with-in the name of being “economically liberal but socially
conservative”-the essence of Christian Fascist values, which has been
brought forward as a needed form of social cohesion and control for
millions of people who have had their lives thrown into uncertainty-and
a world of hurt-by the structural dictates of a globalized economy and
a leaner and meaner competitive capitalist economy.
“Governing
from the center” also means that the Democrats will not seriously
challenge the underlying assumptions that drove the war on Iraq-the
perceived need, according to imperialist exigencies-to
aggressively transform the modes of U.S. domination in the Middle East.
Instead, they will compete to fight it “better.” It means that they
will not-and this they have not even promised!-attempt to repeal the
pro-torture anti-habeas corpus Military Commissions Act”that they will
not oppose the denial of basic rights to immigrants but will almost
certainly “work with Bush” to pass his version of an immigration bill
[see “What the Elections Mean-and Don’t Mean-for Immigrants“]”and so on down the line.
Even
where they have had real differences-and very bitter conflicts-with the
neo-cons and Religious Right, the Democrats have continually given
ground to the Right and increasingly accepted the terms set by the
Right as the “common ground” on which to differ and contend. They
campaigned like this”and they will attempt to govern like this as well.
Acting Now-With Urgency
If
you did vote for the Democrats, everything you were hoping they would
do is just as urgent now as it was three weeks ago. People are still
dying by the hundreds in Iraq-and Afghanistan. The torture goes on at
Guantánamo and who knows where else. The medieval inquisitors continue
to line up for their appointments to federal judgeships. Black people
and other folk victimized by Katrina continue to suffer in makeshift
trailers-if they can get that. The demonization of immigrants continues, as does that of gay people. The reproductive rights of women continue to be shrunk.
The
truth is that Bush is not going to get a brain, Cheney will never find
anything resembling a heart, and the Democrats-no matter how much money
and energy you pour into them-are still going to act like cowardly
lions. There is no bumbling but ultimately benign wizard behind the
screen, no good witch to provide you with ruby slippers to get you back
to a home that was not all that sweet to begin with. There are just
people. There are the ones at the top-the imperialist ruling
class-united in their fundamental interests and divided only
by how best to ensure and pursue those interests” and then there are
the hundreds of millions they rule in this country and the billions
worldwide whom they oppress-including both those on the bottom whom
they bitterly exploit and those “in the middle” whom they constrain and
dominate-all of whose most fundamental interests are opposed to them.
Neither Nancy Pelosi nor Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton will provide a
different direction from the place that society is presently hurtling
toward. But it is time and past time to dramatically and radically
change the whole direction of history-not with the new
direction people were promised by ruling class politicians who are
lashed to the mast of endless war for empire and repression-but by
breaking free and getting unlashed from that mast.
That
does NOT mean that we should not demand with even greater force and
fervor that these Democrats ACT to end the war, to end torture, to
protect science and academia, and all the rest of the intolerable
outrages that drove people to the voting booth. And we should certainly
support those who want to act to force the Democrats to impeach Bush.
But
this society is still on a trajectory toward fascism, only now with a
bi-partisan consensus on critical fronts in the process of being
re-formed. And splits in the ranks of that ruling class consensus,
should they occur, won’t go anywhere good without massive resistance
from the people. To quote World Can’t Wait, there is still time but not
a lot of time. Seizing it requires people to rupture with certain
illusions and yes, finally, confront the fact that you can’t expect
government to do this for you. There is no self-correcting mechanism
that is going to make these fascists go away.
Those
reading this have to challenge themselves and others to cast off self
deceit and cynical excuses for not acting in a meaningful way to stop
the crimes your government is perpetrating on the world. Being bound by
the terms set by this system and the political framework within which
all of its political representatives think and act only serves to make
people objectively complicit with all the things that were not allowed
to be discussed this election. Wanting to avoid upheaval in confronting
all this is impossible-and wrong. And since when was any great evil
defeated without upheaval, without people’s lives being changed, without” struggle.
The
elections are over. They did not and cannot fulfill the hopes people
put in them-but they did show definitively that there are tens of
millions who are disgusted and revolted by this administration and its
whole agenda. Now it’s time to turn to those very people and say-“okay,
now it’s up to us. And I’m willing to change my life to make it happen!”