By Barry Sheppard
US politics must seem quite odd to people in other countries. The Democratic president of the United States is put on trial in the Senate by the Republicans for trying to cover up his affair with a young White House intern. In November a professional wrestler running for a third capitalist party inspires voters in the state of Minnesota to elect him governor, against the candidates of the Democrats and Republicans.
Contrary to expectations, the Republicans lose ground to the Democrats in the elections elsewhere. As a result, the increasingly unpopular Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, Newt Gingrich, resigns.
The Republicans choose Robert Livingston, another southern reactionary like Gingrich, to replace him. But before he can take office he quits, because self-described "smut peddler" Larry Flynt exposes him in Hustler magazine as an adulterer. Flynt put up a lot of money to entice past paramours of Republicans sitting in judgment on Clinton to spill the beans. Hustler plans to "out" 11 more hypocrites in a special issue.
Jerry Falwell, a leading light of the Christian right, goes on TV to denounce Flynt for exposing the Republican adulterers, even as he vigorously calls for Clinton's removal for covering up his adultery.
Columnist Frank Rich writes in the New York Times, "The other hypocrites unmasked by Mr. Flynt's pranks could fill a cabinet department. It's hard to stop laughing when Dick Morris ["outed" last year], who sucked prostitutes' toes while on the White House payroll, decries the publisher for 'degrading American politics' ... Larry Flynt is a bull in the china shop of false pieties, empty pretensions and sexual sermonizing that have brought us to this low moment in American history."
Falwell, who is in the TV evangelism racket soaking millions from the gullible, also opines that the Antichrist is presently alive and is a Jew, and the second coming of Jesus is at hand.
Racists and reactionaries
The Republican head of the Senate, Trent Lott from Mississippi, is exposed as a supporter of a racist outfit that is the continuation of that state's White Citizens Council, which fought against the civil rights movement in the 1960s, including by organising murders of civil rights workers.
Another supporter of the group, the Council of Conservative Citizens, is House member and leading Republican "family values" spokesperson Robert Barr, who was exposed by Flynt as having paid for his wife's abortion, although in Congress he has vigorously opposed a woman's right to choose even in cases of rape, incest or threat to the woman's life.
In the midst of his impeachment proceedings, Clinton ordered the bombing of Iraq, because Iraq refuses to comply with the UN inspectors, charging that they are just a cover for US spies. It then turns out the charge is true, and is admitted by the US government itself.
The impeachment trial opened with Senator Strom Thurmond, an old reactionary racist Dixiecrat-turned-Republican, swearing in Chief Justice of the Supreme Court William Rehnquist as the presiding officer for the trial. Rehnquist, an arch-reactionary and racist himself, appears in an outfit of his own design, a black robe with peculiar stripes on the sleeves that he proudly declares is a copy of a costume he once saw on an actor in a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta.
All of the press and radio and TV commentators solemnly intone that this is a "historic" occasion, and the senators agree. Endless hours of the proceedings are broadcast on National Public Radio and reprinted in the New York Times verbatim, while the rest of the country tunes out, puts on a soap opera or football game and impatiently wishes the whole affair over. Everyone has known the basic facts for months.
The senators adjourn the trial for the day on January 19, and file into the meeting of the whole Congress to hear Clinton's "State of the Union" speech. Members of Congress who hours before had been demanding that Clinton be tossed out of office and sent straight to hell, politely applaud his speech, which is widely approved by the public.
Another TV evangelist and leading light of the Christian right, Pat Robertson (who was caught with a prostitute some years ago, but was forgiven by Jesus, he says), even says Clinton has "hit a home run" with the speech and the impeachment trial might as well be halted. Robertson backtracks when denounced by his followers.
All this is on CNN, and broadcast to the world.
Christian right
As the impeachment and trial have progressed, Clinton's ratings with the public keep climbing, while those of the Republicans go down. This undoubtedly was behind Robertson's concern. Some ordinary Republican voters are publicly changing their party registration. Why, then, have the Republicans pushed ahead so relentlessly?
The answer lies with a core activist constituency in the Republican Party, the Christian right. They are a minority of the party's voters, but control many party caucuses and help get out the vote. They have been demanding the removal of Clinton since the scandal broke a year ago.
They are the cutting edge of the movement to reverse the gains made by blacks and other minorities, women, gays and others in the social movements of the 1960s and early 1970s. They would like to see a Christian theocracy in the United States, complete with a sex police. Sensing that these are the forces behind the attack on Clinton, most people here are sympathetic to him.
The idea that lying about an adulterous affair is a "high crime and misdemeanour" frightens a lot of people. Many think they would do the same if they were in Clinton's shoes.
Opposition to these rightist extremists helped tilt the scale in the November elections slightly toward the Democrats, even though the voter turnout was very low, in the 30% range, reflecting widespread disgust with all the politicians.
The election results and public opposition to the impeachment trial indicate a small shift to the left in bourgeois politics, in the sense that the Christian right was repudiated. The longer the trial goes on, the more isolated that right becomes.
Discontented voters
But the rightward shift by both Republicans and Democrats on other issues has not been reversed. Clinton and most Democrats have embraced Republican issues such as slashing social spending, ending the federal guarantee of welfare for the very poor, supporting the death penalty, cutting back on civil liberties in the guise of fighting "terrorism" and "drugs", cutting back the rights of prisoners, hamstringing the ability of unions to organise, raising war spending and so on.
The election of Jesse Ventura, the professional wrestler, to the governorship of Minnesota on the Reform Party ticket of Ross Perot indicated disgust with both major parties, but not a break with capitalist politics. He openly came out for a woman's right to choose abortion, and for gay rights. He refused to accept campaign money from rich "vested interests", and appeared to be "something new".
On the other hand, he also came out against welfare and child-care subsidies, and social spending in general. His positions put him roughly in the camp of moderate Republicans, who eschew the ravings of the Christian right.
Ventura's presentation of himself as "something new" resulted in a relatively high voter turnout (60%) in Minnesota compared to the rest of the country.
US politics continue to be marked by the fact that there is no mass party even claiming to represent the interests of the working people against those of capital, which could organise the discontent of much of the population. Until that happens, no significant step forward can be made on the electoral field.