A dark week for democracy: The stranglehold the far Right has now taken on America
will make it a more divided, reactionary and
illiberal country
Will Hutton
Sunday November 10, 2002
The Observer
The election in Georgia said it all. The Democrat governor, Roy
Barnes, had dared to remove the Confederate symbol from the
state flag last year. His Republican challenger wanted to bring it
back, to honour, he said, 300,000 Confederate 'veterans'. A
Republican has not occupied Georgia's governor's mansion
since 1872. After last Tuesday, one does, courtesy of wanting to
celebrate a civil war fought to defend slavery.
Europeans do not understand the curious civilisation that the
current America is becoming, and the grip that a visceral and
idiosyncratic conservatism has on its national discourse. They
especially do not understand the undercurrents of an
increasingly self-confident and subtle racism that is its own
variant of the forces that in Europe gave us Le Pen and Pim
Fortuyn. George Bush Jnr is a chip off the old multilateralist,
transatlantic establishment, runs the European argument. He
may seem hawkishly conservative but, in the end, he seeks UN
resolutions like other American Presidents. Even at home, his
bark is worse than his bite.
Wrong, wrong and wrong again. Anyone who thinks the Tory
party is 'nasty' has not encountered contemporary American
republicanism. Georgia's Republican Party, for example, is now
lead by Ralph Reed, a long-time crusader against abortion,
divorce and single parent families. He would regard last week's
vote in the House of Lords allowing unmarried and gay couples
to adopt as the work of Satan. He is part of US conservatism's
ideological hard core.
Reed played every card he could. If the governorship was to be
won celebrating the Confederacy, the race for the Senate seat
would be no less shameless. The Democrat incumbent had lost
three limbs fighting in Vietnam, but was attacked for being
unpatriotic - the worst accusation in today's US - because he
believed that unions should be able to recruit in the newly
established Department of Homeland Security.
And so one of American liberalism's darkest days was repeated
across the country. Minnesota and Missouri, long-time
Democrat strongholds, fell. Governor Jeb Bush, despite the
Democrats insisting that justice now be done for those infamous
chads, won in Florida. As if to underscore conservatism's
ascendancy, the only Democrat gain was in Arkansas where the
Republican senator had suffered a messy divorce and his
Democrat challenger was even more pro-gun and pro-Bible than
the incumbent.
The result is that the Republicans now control the Senate,
House and the presidency for the first time since President
Eisenhower. The consolidation of America as an ultra
conservative country is going to take place rapidly. Mr Bush
may have offered a few tit-bits to show his credentials as a
'compassionate conservative', like his concern to reduce the
price of prescription drugs for the elderly, but the core of the
Republican programme is anything but. There will be radical tax
cuts for the rich and the corporations; a freezing of all efforts to
stiffen regulation in the wake of America's corporate scandals;
moves to privatise the social security system; and a roll-back of
environmental protection.
Abroad, there will be the continued construction of a new
international order built around the prejudices of the American
Right; unqualified support for Israel, building the National Missile
Defence System and tepid support for the framework of
international law and treaties.
Nor do the Conservatives' ambitions stop there. Following the
ideas of the high priest of ultra conservatism, Leo Strauss, they
want to construct a republic of 'moral', god-fearing citizens who
adhere to traditional virtues, rewarding the rich who can only
have become rich through the virtue of hard work and penalising
the poor who are only poor because of their own fecklessness.
Above all, by now having the opportunity to pack the judiciary
with extreme right-wing judges, they intend to do away with the
famous Roe v Wade judgment that legalised abortion. This is the
most fiercely reactionary programme to have emerged in any
Western democracy since the war, and for which last Tuesday's
vote, argue Republicans, is an explicit mandate.
Horseshit. George Bush has al-Qaeda and a low turn-out to
thank for his victory. The central message of his five-day tour of
15 key states in the last week of the election was to play on
Americans' fears about terrorism, rallying them behind their
national leader. When the electorate voted locally, the
Democrats had the edge, winning governorships in four of the
biggest industrial states - Illinois, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and
Michigan. The Democrats I have spoken to are so traumatised
by the overall defeat that they dismiss these gains as irrelevant;
I think they are wrong.
America is not a happy place. A generation of increasingly
conservative policies has shrunk the American middle and
induced not just fantastic inequality but a sharp decline in social
mobility and opportunity. The US's social contract, never more
than minimalist, is now threadbare. Consumer confidence is low;
job insecurity high. American capitalism is viewed with deep
scepticism. Nor are the majority of Americans social
conservatives and closet racists; they do not want the clock put
back over women's rights, the environment and race.
The trouble was that this silent liberal majority was only
prepared to voice its preoccupations at state rather than national
level, if it bothered to vote at all. The Democrats had to find a
way of voicing the concerns of the mass of Americans while not
undermining the President during a national emergency, but to
do that they had to have a powerful pitch based on a liberal
ideology as animating and dynamic as that of the conservatives.
They didn't and they lost.
But the game isn't up. America's conservatives, blinded by their
ideology and in control of every lever of government, will
overreach themselves and the reality of what they plan will
become evident to all, stirring the apathetic voter and reminding
the best of America what it stands for. Last week represented
the highwater mark of American conservatism and, although it
looks bleak, the beginnings of the long-awaited liberal revival.
Not just the United States, but the world, needs it badly. In the
meantime, despite its flaws, give thanks to the European Union
for partial shelter from the conservative storm.
guardian.co.uk |
