The U.S. Elections

When Ralph Nader threw his hat into the ring for the US presidential elections, you could have scripted the response from partisans of the Democratic Party in advance – especially from those who like to flaunt their ‘liberal’ credentials. The veteran anti-corporate activist was on the receiving end of a torrent of abuse and denunciation, most of it highly personalized and lacking in any political content. Nader, we were told, was nothing but a charlatan and an egomaniac, who was running for president once more because of his personal vanity and hankering for the limelight.

Of course, Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton are blessed with the humility of Franciscan monks – their own bids for the White House are driven entirely by their selfless desire to serve the American people. It’s not hard to figure out why Nader’s critics would like to reduce the whole argument to a matter of ego and personality defects. It means they don’t have to engage with the serious political issues at stake (the same logic led opponents of Tony Benn in Britain to deride him as an attention-seeker).

2000 revisited

Before talking about this year’s election, we have to take a look back at the 2000 poll which saw George Bush Jr. come to power, setting the tone for the first decade of the millennium in global politics. Naturally, much of the interest in the coming presidential contest outside the USA is driven by hopes that finally, the American people will close the door on a disastrous era of military aggression and legalized torture by voting the Republicans out of the White House. And there’s been no shortage of Democrat supporters assuring us that it could all have been avoided if Ralph Nader hadn’t run for president eight years ago.

The consensus that Nader deserves the blame for Bush’s victory should be seen for what it is – a lame attempt at historical fiction. The Green Party candidate may have taken a respectable 3% of the vote (according to one poll during the election, just 30% of voters knew that Nader was in the race). But it shouldn’t be necessary to remind anyone that Al Gore still won the election for the Democrats. Not only did Gore win a majority of the popular vote (thanks to the outdated US electoral system, it’s possible to manage this feat and still lose). He should also have had a comfortable majority in the electoral college.

It requires a lot of discipline to forget why this didn’t happen. The Republican Party organization in Florida managed to rig the poll, excluding African-American voters who were entitled to vote by doctoring the electoral register. African-Americans voted overwhelmingly for Gore in 2000 – if it hadn’t been for the abuses in Florida, the Democrats would have taken the White House. The US Supreme Court with its right-wing majority intervened to halt the re-counts and put George Bush in power.

That should have been the cue for Al Gore and his party to declare that the new administration was illegitimate. Unsurprisingly, they shirked the challenge. Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 was an uneven movie, but it had some powerful moments – none more so than the early footage of Al Gore in his capacity as chair ruling out of order every attempt by African-American members of Congress to raise the blatant racial discrimination in Florida on the floor of the House of Representatives. Gore’s performance summed up the role of the Democratic leadership, which had no intention of providing a vehicle for popular outrage.

The nature of the Democratic Party excluded that option. The Democrats have never been a party of the Left, although they have provided a home for many socialists and progressives over the years. The big corporations that dominate American political life have invested heavily in the Democratic party machine, and its leading bodies are quite happy to take direction from that quarter. The centres of corporate power in the US would have been outraged if the Democrats had denied the right of the other pro-business party to rule, and taken the next logical step – calling on people to take to the streets and challenge the thief in the White House.

It was much easier for them to direct their fire at Ralph Nader. Attacking the Bush team would have required courage and determination – Bush had the full support of the Republican Party, a large part of the capitalist class, aggressive media outlets like Fox News and the New York Post, and a whole network of conservative campaigning groups. Nader was an isolated radical whose supporters had little or no platform in the mainstream media and very little cash behind them. So the sordid details of poll-rigging went down the memory-hole and we were left with the story of Nader the spoiler who let Bush into power.

For what it’s worth, opinion polls at the time suggested that most of those who voted for Nader would have stayed at home if he wasn’t in the race – they were so fed up after eight years of Democrat rule, marked by attacks on working people and the poor, that they couldn’t stomach voting for Al Gore, even as the lesser of two evils. That cut no ice with the Nader-bashers, who continued to denounce the environmentalist throughout the Bush years. The news that he was in the race once more in 2008 brought all the clichés out of cold storage – you’d be hard-pressed to find a reference to Florida anywhere in the polemics.

Bush and the Democrats

The claim that everything would have been different over the past eight years if Al Gore had marched into the White House has an obvious political purpose – to channel progressive hopes into support for whichever candidate the Democrats put forward this autumn. Naturally, we can’t be sure what President Gore would have done in office. It would be a mistake to look at Gore’s high-profile campaigning to raise awareness of climate change and assume that his administration would have taken a leading role in the struggle against global warming – Gore the individual is not the same as Gore the candidate, and he was a great deal more timid on the subject during his time as Vice-President in the 1990s.

Surely the best way of judging how different things would have been under the Democrats is to look at their record of opposition to Bush. If the Democrats had been strong and determined in their opposition to Bush’s agenda, then it’s probably fair to guess that their own actions in office would have been different. But they were anything but strong and determined – after 9/11, the Democrats capitulated and began marching to the beat coming from the White House, supporting the foreign-policy adventures of the Bush administration and its attacks on civil liberties.

When John Kerry challenged Bush in 2004, he emphatically refused to condemn the invasion of Iraq. Kerry had voted in the US Senate to give Bush power to make war on Iraq, and he repeatedly told journalists that he would do the same again, even with all the information that had since come to light. Karl Rove, the president’s main political strategist, described that statement with great relish as ‘the gift that just kept giving’.

Now that the occupation of Iraq has proved to be such an obvious disaster, there’s been an attempt to place the blame for the war on a very narrow section of the US political class. We are supposed to believe that the world’s most powerful nation sent its armed forces to the Middle East to occupy one of the main oil-producing states because a small group of zealous right-wing ideologues had the ear of Bush and Cheney. Once the neo-conservatives are ousted from their positions of influence, things will be okay again. That theory makes it very hard to explain why Kerry and other Washington-based Democrats lined up behind the project, or why the liberal New York Times allowed itself to be used as a conduit for black propaganda about Iraqi WMDs.

In fact, responsibility for the Iraq war lies with a very broad cross-section of the power elites in the USA, and they would all be queuing up to take credit if the news from Baghdad was more cheerful than it has proved to be. There is no reason to feel sure that a Democratic administration would not also have taken advantage of the post-9/11 window of opportunity to invade Iraq and bring its oil reserves under US control – the geo-political thinking behind the invasion would have been the same, regardless of which wing of the corporate party was in power. Just consider the fact that Hilary Clinton, one of the front-runners for the Democratic nomination this year, has only recently admitted that she was wrong to support the war. That was a necessary adjustment to public opinion, of course, not a genuine re-think.

This year’s election

Judging by the eager response to Barack Obama’s campaign from many Americans, there’s a good number of people in the country who want a new direction after eight years of the Bush administration. His rhetoric has aimed to tap into that feeling, with constant talk of ‘change’ and ‘renewal’, while remaining pretty vague – who actually knows what the ‘audacity of hope’ or the ‘fierce urgency of now’ might be?

Of course, it’s a good thing that an African-American can be considered a serious candidate for the White House. But Obama’s campaign has little of the progressive charge that fuelled Jessie Jackson’s challenge for the Democratic nomination twenty years ago. Obama has made a point of distancing himself from the confrontational approach of civil rights leaders like Jackson, and it’s too much to hope that his election would make a big difference to social conditions in the black ghettoes. Entrenched racism and poverty will remain in place, even under President Obama.

Unlike Hilary Clinton, Obama opposed the invasion of Iraq. But don’t expect any radical change in US policy towards the Middle East – both Democratic candidates have ruled out an early withdrawal from Iraq, both have declared their willingness to order an attack on Iran, and both have pledged to continue supporting Israel’s colonial occupation of Palestinian land come what may.

There may be differences between the Republicans and the Democrats, but those differences are confined within a fairly narrow spectrum. There is no question of the Democrats nominating a candidate who promises to establish a universal health care system, tackle corporate power, expand workers’ rights, slash the military budget and end US interference in the rest of the world. Not because those policies would be too unpopular with the US population (there are already sizeable minorities, or sometimes even majorities in their favour), but because it would threaten the interests that fund the two-party system.

That doesn’t mean there’s a big opportunity this year for a third-party candidate running on a platform of that sort. If Ralph Nader does get his name onto the ballot this November, as a Green or an independent, it seems unlikely that his campaign will reach the same level as 2000 – a repeat of the last presidential election, when Nader scored below 1%, is probably a fair estimate. Eight years of Republican rule have driven many progressives back into the Democratic fold, despite the refusal of that party to offer them anything concrete to justify supporting its candidates.

At the beginning of the decade, there was a modest but genuine revival in left-wing activism in the USA, symbolized by the Seattle protests that came a year before Nader’s crack at the presidency – and one of its main targets was a Democratic administration. Since then, we’ve seen massive anti-war demonstrations, but much of that energy was channeled into support for John Kerry. This time around, there will probably be a huge push to elect the Democratic candidate (especially if his name is Obama) that marginalises efforts to build an alternative to the political status quo.

Four years ago, some progressives like Naomi Klein argued for support for Kerry on the grounds that once the Democrats were back in the White House, people could focus once more on their inadequacies and the crippling pressure of the ‘anybody but Bush’ argument would be lifted from the backs of left activists. That seems to be the most we can hope for as a direct result of the election later this year. There can be few people with any sense who would not relish the defeat of a party as corrupt, authoritarian and reactionary as the US Republicans. But if and when the Democrats get back into power, it won’t change the fundamentals of a system based on savage inequality at home and ruthless aggression abroad.