Race and class in the US: The duopoly
It's official: Al Gore and Joseph Lieberman are the Democratic Party nominees for president and vice-president of the United States; George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are the Republican Party nominees. The "race for the White House" is now on.
What is striking about the two parties is how similar they are. Bush and Gore are both sons of prominent, wealthy families with strong ties to big oil.
Bush picked a hard-core right-wing insider as his running mate. Wall Street hailed the choice. Gore picked a conservative ("moderate" in US-speak) senator from Connecticut as his running mate. Wall Street and Washington pundits cheered. Running mates who are well-known servants of the big oil companies (Cheney) and the big insurance companies (Lieberman) are just fine with big US capital.
(In stark contrast, the Green Party's presidential candidate Ralph Nader picked a Native-American activist Winona LaDuke as his vice-presidential candidate.)
The media bonanzas, called "party conventions", lacked excitement (and viewers). Both major party tickets were selected before the conventions by a process that is so flawed that to call it democratic is a joke.
The New York Times' headline, "Democrats' convention, like the GOP's, is underwritten by corporations", was not a criticism but a simple statement of fact. The system is a money-run duopoly.
The two-party system provides political stability to the capitalist system. It does not matter that every four years only half of the voting-age population bothers to vote. What matters is that there is a facade of democracy. The electoral game allows the Democrats and Republicans to alternate control of Congress and the White House, as well as state and local governments.
From the standpoint of democracy, the system is a fake. But it works and has worked for more than 200 years for the ruling class. Bourgeois stability has been preserved even though there have been periodic social explosions. By providing the appearance that there are alternatives (and therefore choices), the system can absorb the social protest movements that force modifications of the system without threatening it.
In the 1800s, the Republican Party served that role by becoming the party of those who wanted slavery abolished. In the 1930s, and since, the Democratic Party has become the welcome wagon of labour, African Americans, women and others of the "rainbow" so as to soak up social movements for change.
The US working class has never had a mass political party of its own, not even a social-democratic party like those in Australia or most European countries. There have been feeble attempts to form labour and black parties, but none have survived. The leaderships of the trade union, civil rights and women's rights movements tell workers and others that "their" party is the Democratic Party.
One of the tricks of the duopoly system is to convince people that change comes from participating in the electoral system. This is where the conventions, the primaries and elections come into play. At the two parties' conventions, the "outsiders" were the protesters, portrayed as disrupters who cannot bring about change for so long as they are not part of the system.
In Philadelphia, the police did their part by arresting more than 400 protesters and demanding bails of $500,000-$1 million. In Los Angeles, the Democrats were protected by an aggressive police force that arrested more than 200 protesters.
Unlike the Republican convention, the Democrat convention had a few veterans of social movements as delegates. They were more than willing to criticise their former comrades and tactics. Bobby Rush, a former leader of the Black Panthers and now a Congress member from Chicago, supported the right to protest but claimed that the demonstrators did not know how to be effective — the classic charge of all electoralists.
The truth is that major political changes in the US have always been in response to mass social protest movements that were not part of the duopoly. They were direct action movements that shook the system to its foundations and caused the ruling elites to modify the system to maintain stability and their control.
The Democrat's platform states that it is for affirmative action, for women's right to choose, against discrimination against gays and lesbians, and for gun control and better health care. The Republicans oppose such things. However, what the new US president will do in office will be determined by the big social forces in the country and the world.
Republican president Richard Nixon, the arch anticommunist, established relations with the People's Republic of China and signed affirmative action programs far more advanced than those of Democrat President Bill Clinton. On foreign policy, both Republican president Ronald Reagan and Clinton spent billions on the Pentagon and gave billions more to the war industries.
The terms "liberal" and "conservative" have little meaning in US politics. Both the liberal Democrats and the conservative Republicans support the embargo against Cuba. The liberal Gore and the conservative Bush opposed the justice department's rescue of kidnapped Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez and his return to Cuba.
One of the main arguments being made by liberals in favour of a vote for Gore (rather than Nader) is that he will ensure a pro-choice US Supreme Court. They believe Bush will appoint anti-choice judges. Is there any truth to this? Only if you believe the Supreme Court operates above social and class struggles.
Barbara Ehrenreich, in the August 21-28 US Nation magazine, answered those feminists pushing for Gore's election because of his "pro-choice" proclamations: "Ah, the Supreme Court! Never mind that pro-choice Justice O'Connor was a Reagan appointee or that Clinton's man Breyer is one of the most economically conservative justices around, the Supreme Court gets dragged out every four years to squash any attempts to escape the Democratic Party ...
"We didn't get legal abortion in the first place because nine men in black robes were kind enough to allow us to have it. Women fought for it by every means possible, illegal as well as legal ... Roe vs Wade wasn't the author of women's liberation, just as Brown vs Boards of Education did not create the civil rights movement. Deep social change is made by deep social movements."
While Nader and the Greens are not proposing socialist policies, their anti-corporation, anti-rich, pro-working people campaign aims to build social movements for change. Such movements are the only road to change and building a mass electoral political movement for the future.
BY MALIK MIAH