Every four years the United States holds its Presidential Elections. This time everybody knows what the Republican Party Presidential candidate George Bush stands for: arrogant naked imperialist aggression. Some in the United States left are so shocked by Bush and his Neo-Conservative backers, that they argue that Bush is so extreme, so terrible for America and the World, that everyone should close ranks, rally behind another candidate who can defeat him: ‘Anyone Is Better Than Bush’. Noam Chomsky, the left intellectual takes this position. So does Michael Moore, the radical filmmaker. So does The Nation, a left-liberal magazine similar to the British New Statesman.
‘Anybody but Bush’: the politics of the lesser evil
But will voting for the alternative defend and advance the interests of the working class and oppressed? What are American workers getting if they follow the advice of Moore, the Nation and their friends and vote for John Kerry? Where do Kerry and John Edwards, his Vice-Presidential running mate, stand on the important issues? What is the supposed vital difference that justifies support for Kerry?
Iraq War
Iraq is the most important issue in the United States. Edwards co-sponsored the resolution to attack Iraq:
‘Saddam Hussein’s regime represents a grave threat to America and our allies, including our vital ally, Israel. …We know that he has chemical and biological weapons.…We know that he is doing everything he can to build nuclear weapons, and we know that each day he gets closer to achieving that goal.’ (Senate, 10 October 2002)
Kerry voted for Edwards’ motion. Earlier he had argued that:
‘If Saddam Hussein is unwilling to bend to the international community’s already existing order, then he will have invited enforcement, even if that enforcement is mostly at the hands of the United States, a right we retain even if the Security Council fails to act.’ New York Times, 6 September 2002.
A year later, during a debate at the Congressional Black Caucus Institute, Kerry was asked if he saw the war in Iraq as a mistake, and he replied:
‘We need to be successful. People keep asking what’s the exit strategy. The exit strategy is victory.’
9 September 2003.
Edwards continued this theme at the recent Democratic Convention: ‘we will win this war because of the strength and courage of our own people’. Kerry may believe it was ‘the wrong war, at the wrong time, in the wrong place’, but he helped start it, and he and Edwards are ready to continue it. They promise to expand America’s active duty forces by 40,000 and double the Army’s Special Forces capability within four years.
PATRIOT Act
The repressive, anti-democratic PATRIOT Act got the votes of both Kerry and Edwards. According to Edwards: ‘the problem with the PATRIOT Act is not the law itself, it’s the way it’s being administered’ (Debate in Columbia SC, 3 May 2003)
Venezuela
Kerry has the same position as Bush on Venezuela. He gave an interview to the Spanish language Univision TV channel on Wednesday 5 May 2004. The Univision network is part of the Cisneros Group of Companies, owned by Gustavo Cisneros, a Venezuelan billionaire of Cuban descent and outspoken Chavez opponent who has been implicated in the April 2002 coup d’état against Chavez. When asked if he considered Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez a dictator, Kerry responded: ‘Chavez is fast on the road of becoming exactly that. He is breaking the rules of democracy. I think it is very important for him to allow that referendum to take place and for this administration and others to put more visibility on what is happening so we can hold him accountable to international standards of behaviour. Democracy is at risk.’ Venezuelan democracy will certainly be at risk under a President Kerry.
Cuba
Kerry told WPLG-ABC 10, a Miami TV station: ‘I’m pretty tough on Castro, because I think he’s running one of the last vestiges of a Stalinist secret police government in the world’ (14 March 2004).
Israel
Kerry’s top Middle East adviser is former Congressman Mel Levine, a former board member of the ultra-Zionist lobbying operation American Israel Public Affairs Committee. According to Levine ‘By every rating and criterion Kerry’s votes have shown 100 per cent solid support for Israel’. According to the Kerry campaign position paper on Israel, Kerry believes that:
‘…in any final settlement for Israel to remain a Jewish State, Palestinians must settle in a future Palestinian State rather than in Israel, and that in light of demographic realities, a number of settlement blocks will likely become a part of Israel…The security fence is a legitimate act of self defence…long advocated moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem, Israel’s indisputable capital…America must guarantee Israel’s military superiority …’
It’s all Israel, all the way, not only uncritically, but enthusiastically.
On the Vietnam war
‘As a veteran of both the Vietnam War and the Vietnam protest movement, I say to both conservative and liberal misinterpretations of that war that it’s time to get over it and recognise it as an exception, not as a ruling example, of the US military engagements of the twentieth century.’
On US imperialism
‘It is up to Democrats to understand and prepare for Fourth Generation Warfare – fighting unconventional forces in unconventional ways – so our nation can be better prepared to wage and win the new war.’ Campaign website.
Of course, none of this should be surprising from a man proud to receive a medal for murdering a patriotic Vietnamese teenager defending his country against US imperialism. The only surprising thing is that anyone can pretend to support peace and democracy and support Kerry.
In what possible way are these people any better than Bush? Chomsky argues that on domestic issues Kerry would be better than Bush (International Socialist Review, September-October 2004) But this is exactly what was said about Clinton – who promptly destroyed the US welfare system. Republicans were angry with him because he got the credit for carrying out their programme.
Is there an alternative? What about Ralph Nader who is running on a leftist platform? His platform is sometimes confused and some of it may be reactionary. But this is only to be expected: for the last 150 years, US politics has been dominated by the two big bourgeois parties: Republicans and Democrats. These parties represent different factions of the ruling class and have differences over the best policy for US imperialism. They draw their electoral support from different geographical, social, religious and ethnic groups and coalitions. The Democrats get their support from the unions, from sections of the middle class, particularly lawyers, Jews (until recently), blacks and other ethnic minorities and women. The Republicans draw on small business owners, backward sections of the working class, crackpot petit-bourgeois religious fundamentalists, Wall Street financiers and other capitalists.
As events and policies attract and repel support, it is inevitable that sections of the middle class and petit-bourgeoisie will be disappointed and look for an alternative. ‘They are a splendid element for politicians, who speculate on their discontent in order to sell them out to one of the big parties afterward’, Engels astutely observed.* Typically, they are attracted to a party whose platform attacks the ‘big corporations’, champions ‘ordinary people’, attacks ‘the power elite’ and proposes radical measures to ‘shake up the system’ – this is American Populism, which has been an integral feature of US politics for well over a century. Sometimes this is on the right – Ross Perot’s Reform Party in 1992, for example, which took votes from the Republicans, allowing Clinton to win. Sometimes it is on the left. Since there is still no significant party based in the working class, radical elements of the petit-bourgeoisie are attracted to platforms like Nader’s with its brew of social-democracy, environmentalism, pro-electoral reform politics.
The Democrats’ steady rightward march puts increasing distance between themselves and social groups whose support could previously be taken for granted. And into that gap Ralph Nader has stepped, with a leftish-platform which attracts many who are looking for an alternative to the Democratic Party. The Democrats are terrified that Nader will do to them what Ross Perot did to the Republicans in 1992: take votes away from them. (They blame Nader for Gore’s defeat in Florida, by some 500 votes. In fact, some 250,000 registered Democrats voted for Bush, far exceeding Nader’s paltry 98,000 votes).
So the Democrats, although they deny it, have been trying to undermine Nader’s support. In May, the Village Voice, a New York magazine, published a racist attack on Nader who is an Arab-American. In an hysterical article: ‘Ralph Nader: Suicide Bomber’, Harry Levine claimed that: ‘In the year 2000, Ralph Nader strapped political dynamite onto himself and walked into one of the closest elections in American history hoping to blow it up’. In recent months, teams of Democratic lawyers have been despatched to every state in an attempt to get Nader off the ballot. So far they have succeeded in Arizona, California, Illinois, Mississippi, New Jersey, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia, often winning on narrow technicalities. Instead of meeting in open political confrontation, the Democrats are trying to prevent voters from exercising their choice. And these are the people Chomsky, Moore and co want us to support: thoroughly pro-imperialist, ready to crush the slightest challenge from the left?
What really scares Moore and the intellectuals of The Nation magazine is that Bush shows just how irrelevant and impotent the self-important petit-bourgeois liberal intelligentsia really is. Always ready with smart remarks, repelled by the hard work of building a true alliance with the American working-class, clinging to their own sense of superior insight, their most immediate instinct is to sneer at Bush’s intelligence, not at his reactionary imperialist politics, to start a lawsuit in court, not link arms with the working class in its struggles on the streets.
No, the time for electoral games is over. The real challenge to Bush will not come from Kerry and the Democratic Party or Nader, but from many thousands of ordinary working people who are increasingly being drawn into struggle against US imperialism, who will be fighting and organising before, during and long after the election charade is over.
Steve Palmer
1 *Engels to Sorge, 6 January 1892
FRFI 181 October / November 2004
