Steve Fraser
TO begin with, polls indicate that the election represented an explicit repudiation of the Republican Party as a party; at least, as explicit as one could possibly expect in a midterm election. Try as they did to argue beforehand that all elections are local, Republican leaders knew that not to be the case, not this time; indeed, that's precisely why they traipsed around the country vociferously denying what they deeply feared was true.
Under normal circumstances and by its very nature, in the American electoral system -- monopolised by two amorphously constituted parties of little distinct ideological or programmatic identity, and with its multiple disincentives to any kind of independent party representation -- it is usually excruciatingly hard to register voter sentiment on behalf of a party rather than a candidate. But the election of 2006 was not normal in this regard. There are indications that significant numbers of Americans voted against the Republican Party and, with less enthusiasm to be sure, for the Democratic Party.
Perhaps most tellingly, in numerous races moderate Republicans, who remained quite popular with their constituents and had enjoyed long tenure in office -- the best known case is Lincoln Chafee in Rhode Island -- succumbed to Democrats who were often no more to the "left" than they were. Notwithstanding the inherent fuzziness of what either of the parties stands for, voters seemed ready to conclude that the Republican Party and the administration of George Bush could be fairly associated with the disaster in Iraq, the shameful incompetence and callousness of the response to Hurricane Katrina, the rank and systemic corruption associated with lobbyist Jack Abramoff, and the crony capitalism of the oil companies and Halliburton. Voting for the Democratic Party was a way of repudiating all that, even if any particular Republican candidate might be blameless.
Then, there is the matter of the "Blue Dogs." It turns out that rumours of their ascendancy were not so much exaggerated as mischaracterized. True enough Senate candidates like Bob Casey in Pennsylvania or James Webb in Virginia were well-known supporters of such social conservative causes as gun ownership or the "right to life." But these were hardly the issues they ran on. On the contrary, the campaigns of Webb and Casey, not to mention Sherrod Brown's Senate campaign in Ohio and those of many fellow "Blue Dogs" running for House seats, stressed opposition to the war in Iraq and anger directed at big pharma, big oil, tax breaks for the rich, and free-trade globalization agreements like NAFTA.
Far more often than not, economic populism, not social conservatism, is what lent the Democrats, and in particular the Blue Dogs, an edge.
This same sentiment could be felt, both before and immediately after the election, in the overwhelming support for a quick Congressional move to raise the minimum wage and to empower Medicare to lower prescription drug prices by bargaining with the big pharmaceuticals. Even more remarkable, given the perilous state of the labour movement, is the emergence of a House majority in favour of the Employee Free Choice Act, a bill that would make it easier for millions of workers to join unions, a development critical to shifting the balance of political and economic power.
It would be premature to speak of a fully formed populist/New Deal-like alternative within the Democratic Party or to suggest that people were voting for such a possibility in 2006. Nonetheless, when the Democratic leadership anointed its opening agenda as the new governing party in Congress with the resonant phrase "the first 100 hours," echoing FDR's first 100 days, there was nothing accidental about it.
So, too, certain demographic and geopolitical trends that showed up in 2006 are suggestive of changes to come. The Latino vote, which in the 2004 presidential election was relatively evenly divided between George Bush and John Kerry, went a whopping 70% for the Democrats this time. And that wasn't even the biggest percentage shift in voting behaviour from the 2004 election in favour of the Democrats. That took place among white, non-college-educated working people who, for some time, have made up the core of the conservative populist constituency of the Reagan counter-revolution. Although all the numbers are not yet in, estimates suggest that about one-half of the shift toward the Democrats came from white working-class voters.
Regionally, the Democratic Party made significant gains in the Rocky Mountain West, while clearing away the remnant outposts of Republicanism in much of the Northeast and driving Republicans from Rustbelt outposts in Ohio and Missouri. The logic of that trend -- which doesn't, of course, mean that it will be realised -- is to regionalize the Republican Party in the South. In this way, the southernization of national politics, which was the great accomplishment of the Reagan political order, might be replaced by the southernization of the Republican Party.
Even the early talk about presidential candidates seems portentous. On the Democratic side there is no one to the right of Hillary Clinton, certainly a sign of a shift in the Party's center of gravity.
But odder than that is the candidacy of Barack Obama. It seems to signal a thirst for a messiah. Such a quest can be symptomatic of many things, some bad, some not as bad.
Obamaism is a real mystery. Others have already noted that messiahs don't normally come from the middle as he most emphatically does. Moreover, the charisma that surrounds the prince of banality from Illinois is even harder to decipher, attached as it is to nothing tangible or providential as was Robert Kennedy's lightning 1968 ascension before his assassination, his candidacy held aloft, rightly or wrongly, by the energies of the antiwar and civil rights upheavals.
Something -- though it's hard to tell what -- may be blowin' in the wind.
Perhaps the better question, then, is: Will the presidential election of 2008 turn out to be a turning-point election of historic proportions. The greatest unknown is whether or not the status quo is headed for a breakdown crisis severe enough to clear the ground for such a transformative moment.
Signs certainly point in that direction. The convergence of imperial defeat, economic insecurity, and rampant corporate malfeasance might be enough all by themselves.
But the sudden change in the political status of global warming -- once the dim, background hum of some far distant disturbance, now more like the heart-stopping premonitory theme music from the soundtrack of Jaws -- magnifies the crisis of the whole global order, at home and abroad. Anatole Lieven has called it global capitalism's "existential challenge." Life as we've known it may be beginning to end. Congress is already holding hearings about the natural apocalypse to come, and all but the most ostrich-like politicians acknowledge global warming as an urgent reality; a fact-on-the-ground, so to speak, no longer a debatable theory.
The Bush administration -- and so the old order -- has staked a lot on Iraq, not just its geopolitical and global economic ambitions. Its already severely diminished status as a moral exemplar of democracy and civil liberties won't survive this latest plunge into military mayhem.
Moreover, the President's "surge" plan is a mortal threat to the secret source of the regime's strength at home. The politics of fear and imperial bravado, which once won it legions of followers, may, in the aftermath of the surge, reach its own turning point as those voters abandon ship as fast as they once climbed aboard.
Can the administration or the old order survive a fiasco of such proportions?
Iraq is also the equivalent of a budgetary bunker-busting nuclear device. It exacerbates an already aggravated economic dilemma. Despite a Noah's flood of statistics that seem to support a Pollyana-ish view that we live today in the best of economic good times, millions of Americans experience the opposite -- a yawning gulf of insecurity affecting their health, retirement, and employment prospects. They share a gloomy sense of moving backwards, of decline.
Once upon a time, poverty was associated with the super-exploitation of those who toiled for meager reward.
Then, in mid-twentieth century America, poverty came to be associated with the lack of work, with those so marginalized they were shut-out of the main avenues of modern commerce and industry. Nowadays, we are rushing back to the nineteenth century. Today, 30 million people in the United States work long and hard and still live in poverty.
Insecurity even more pervasive than this once supplied the energy responsible for supplanting laissez-faire capitalism with the New Deal.
Might we be approaching something of that scale and scope today? Though there can be no definitive answer to this, there also can be no question that a general crisis of economic insecurity confronts the old order. All of its self-serving and adventitious rhetoric about the heroics of risk fall on increasingly deaf ears.
Not incidentally, since we live in the age of the global sweatshop, that older order is now global in scope; and the international financial mechanisms that so far have kept the global system humming for the U.S. are themselves under great and increasing strain. The system is, at present, being kept aloft by the needs of China, Japan, and other major economic powers. One day soon they may find the burden of swallowing gargantuan amounts of U.S. debt insupportable.
Are we heading toward a breakdown like the one which, in the early 1970s, forced the Nixon administration to scrap the Bretton Woods financial system, the defining economic institution of the post-war Pax Americana? Together with defeat in Vietnam, the devaluation of the dollar, and the end of fixed exchange rates for international currencies exacerbated the general impasse in which the New Deal order then found itself.
When it comes to the social reputation of our corporate elite, is it necessary to say anything more than Enron? The litany of shameless profiteering, felonious behaviour, cronyism, and corruption at the apex of the private economy has arguably called into question the "right to rule" of those presiding over the country's key economic institutions. Even at the regime's hubristic height following Bush's presidential victory in 2004, he discovered he'd crossed a bridge too far in his attempt to turn over the Social Security System to Wall Street.
Trust in the corporate elite has only grown frailer since then. Cynicism mixed with rage is a potentially explosive brew that fuels the economic populism even someone as "establishment" as James Webb articulated in his alternate State of the Union Address.
What may make these converging dilemmas over-ripe for change is the response of the old order itself.
One sign that some decisive crisis has arrived is the growing incapacity of those in charge to adapt -- as if the dire nature of what's happening dries up the springs of their political imaginations, forcing them to fall back on brittle orthodoxies. Andrew Mellon's notion of liquidating everything in sight as a way out of the Great Depression was one case of mental paralysis, a retreat to what had once "worked"; after all, the periodic busts endemic to the laissez-faire capitalist life-cycle had, in the past, always cured themselves, even if the "cure" included a great deal of what we would today call "collateral damage." The Bush administration is similarly falling back on its own orthodoxies, each move only betraying just how out of touch its top officials are with the new political and social realities forming around them.
Take its reaction to the stunning electoral defeat it suffered last November. The President's new "surge" plan, the self-destructive decision to forge ahead in Iraq without a scintilla of reasonable hope of success, even from the standpoint of the most cynical imperialist, is such a reaction: instinctive, unreflective, inflexible, and probably deeply believed in.
In other words, there is a resort to the ideological fixations which have long-driven this regime -- and the larger political order from which it rose - but which only become ever more rigidified as reality bites back.
So, for another example, the administration's response to the crisis of economic insecurity has amounted to an ideological provocation shoved right in the teeth of its own electoral repudiation. Bush proposed a massive cut in Medicare and Medicaid and, even more in-your-face than that, a tax on the health insurance of those dwindling remnants of the New Deal order who still enjoy some decent level of employer-funded health care.
Everything the old regime can imagine to defend itself ends up making things worse. With some poetic license, one is reminded of an inversion of that old Marxist axiom in which the capitalists, not the proletariat, become the gravediggers of capitalism.
Of course, that is a gross exaggeration. The question of the moment is not: Will 2008 be a turning-point election, but rather can it be one?
Here, everything depends not on what the old order does on its own behalf, no matter how bone-headed, but on how the gathering forces of opposition respond to the system's crisis. Is there a willingness to build a clear, programmatic alternative inside the Democratic Party? It is, after all, an institution deeply infected with free market/free trade ideology and most of the imperial presumptions of the conservative counter-revolution.
Is there a readiness to mobilize around non-market solutions to the general crisis: To fight openly for the re-regulation of the economy and its planned re-industrialization; for its re-unionization; for redistributive policies to supplant the idée fixe of economic growth; for the dismantling of the petro-industrial complex and its replacement by a new, non-fossil-fuel system of energy production; for a global assault on the global sweatshop?
Will there be a new era of polarization rather than centrism, partisanship rather than bi-partisanship, a head-on confrontation with the Democratic Leadership Council, like the guerilla wars once waged against the John Jacob Raskob and Al Smith elite of the pre-New Deal Democratic Party or the one waged by the Goldwater legions against the silk-stocking Rockefeller Republicans? Once upon a time, someone as mild-mannered as Franklin Delano Roosevelt found it within himself to "welcome the hatred" of those he labeled "economic royalists." Might there be someone equally unafraid waiting in the wings today?
Is there a new order being born, ready to challenge the old one where it is both weakest and also strongest: namely, in the imperial arena?
Not only has global aggression proved deadly to all, depraved in its moral consequences, and life-threatening to basic democratic principles and institutions at home, but it has also been the most fruitful, life-giving incubator of the conservative cultural populism which the old order has relied on for a generation.
Anti-World War I intellectual Randolph Bourne's prophetic aperçu -- "War is the health of the State" -- needs to be made even more embracing: War has become the health of a whole political culture, not to mention the vast, hard-wired military-industrial apparatus with which it lives in symbiotic bliss. Is there a will to take on that system of cherished phobias, delusional consolations, and implacable interests?
Finally, there is the X factor, most unknowable of all, but also most critical in converting a mere election into something more transformative. Might a social movement or movements emerge from outside the boundaries of conventional politics, catalytic enough to fundamentally alter the prevailing metabolism of political life?
Might the mass demonstrations of immigrants portend something of that kind? Might the anti-war movement soon enter a period of more sustained and varied opposition in the face of this administration's barbaric obtuseness? Straws in the wind as we race toward 2008. (Steve Fraser is co-founder of the American Empire Project and Editor-at-Large of the journal New Labor Forum. He is the author of Every Man a Speculator, A History of Wall Street in American Life, and most recently co-editor of Ruling America: A History of Wealth and Power in a Democracy)
