Once it became clear that dominant fractions of the ruling class had come to recognize that a division of labor between the two major political parties that coincided with the best interests of the national capital rested on the election of John Kerry, the mass media quickly fell into line to help facilitate this result. The first inklings of this came in the positive coverage of Kerry’s speech at New York University in September, where he changed position and clearly denounced the war in Iraq as the wrong war at the wrong time, a distraction from the war against terrorism and the crusade to find and kill Osama bin Laden. But the first clear expression of the media’s new orientation came in the coverage of the first presidential debate, focused on foreign policy – supposedly Bush’s strong card, according to the media pundits. The media made it clear that Kerry was the big winner in that debate, that Bush was the big loser, and that Kerry and the Democrats had emerged from the debate with a renewed confidence and self-assurance.
Soon afterwards, the vice presidential debate pitted the experienced Dick Cheney against the newcomer John Edwards. Again the media coverage of the debate emphasized an important breakthrough for the Democrats. Cheney had launched a blistering attack in the debate against what he called Edwards’ “undistinguished” career in the Senate. Cheney charged that though he presides over the meetings of the Senate, he had never met Edwards until they walked on stage for the debate. The media was all over this charge and by the 7:00 am news shows the next day had gathered video tape of at least three occasions when the Cheney and Edwards had met. One showed the two men sitting side by side at Senate prayer breakfast. Whatever advantage Cheney had had during the debate quickly evaporated with the exposure of his blatant lie.
The media moved quickly after the third presidential debate when Bush had scoffed at Kerry’s charge that the President had publicly stated that he was not concerned about bin Laden. When Bush made that denial, Kerry simply grinned. Perhaps he knew that by the next morning the media would produce video to show that Bush had indeed made such a comment at a press conference, again exposing the Republicans as liars.
ABC News executives subsequently issued a memorandum to their staff which argued that while both candidates were distorting and stretching the truth in their campaign speeches and political commercials, Kerry’s distortions tended to involve only peripheral issues, but Bush’s dealt with issues at the heart of the campaign. The memo therefore instructed network journalists to highlight these gross distortions in their coverage.
Officials in the permanent bureaucracy seeking to influence the course of the election began leaking a series of damaging stories to expose Bush administration errors and wrongdoing, particularly in regard to Iraq. The media promptly picked up these stories and gave them wide exposure, including reports about the Bush administration’s efforts to create secret changes in the military justice system that circumvented the provisions of the Geneva Convention. Central players in this scandal were Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, Attorney General Ashcroft, and White House aides. The plan was so secret that neither Secretary of State Colin Powell nor National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice were informed. An anonymous source within the CIA reported that there had been widespread opposition to the plan because it violated American democratic principles. Yet another damaging story concerned the disappearance of 380 tons of high explosives that American troops had failed to secure and which had probably fallen into the “wrong” hands and are probably being used against American forces in Iraq. And just a week before the election, sources in the FBI leaked details of a planned criminal investigation of Halliburton’s preferential treatment in the granting of lucrative no-bid contracts in Afghanistan and Iraq. (VP Cheney was the chief executive of Halliburton prior to the 2000 election.) The media also gave prominent and sympathetic play to the story of the 19 soldiers who refused a direct order to participate in a supply caravan to deliver fuel supplies in Iraq, because they complained it was a “suicide mission” because their trucks were not armored and they would not have an armed escort. Rather than portraying these soldiers as mutineers and cowards, stories described them sympathetically, as brave and honorable soldiers fed up with being poorly supplied and armed – exactly what the Kerry campaign had been charging for weeks.
One media commentator even noted a shift in coverage by the pro-Bush media controlled by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. For example, the NY Post ran a picture of Bush and Kerry standing side by side after one of the presidential debates, which unflatteringly depicted Kerry towering over the president. One Bush-Cheney campaign official reportedly complained, “Couldn’t they choose a better angle?”(amNew York, Oct. 21, 2004)
Yet another example of the media falling into line could be seen in what happened with the threat by pro-Bush Sinclair Media company to air a 45-minute anti-Kerry documentary attacking Kerry’s Vietnam war record on the 60 local stations it owns across the country, many of them in the so-called battleground states. The chief executive had actually compared the refusal of the mainstream networks to broadcast the film as tantamount to supporting holocaust revisionists. However, under pressure from journalists from within their own organization, major stockholders, and government officials, Sinclair backed down, and excerpted several scenes from the controversial documentary along with scenes from anti-Bush films to include a shortened and more “balanced” report on the campaign.
The results of the presidential election reflect the increasing difficulties that the American ruling class is experiencing in its ability to manipulate the electoral circus. These difficulties, which first appeared in the debacle of the 2000 election, were manifest this year in two important respects.
First, it took the bourgeoisie a comparatively long time to coalesce around how best to realign the political division of labor between the Republicans and Democrats – perhaps too long a time. It wasn’t until mid-September, that one could discern a preference for the election of Kerry, as evidenced in the pronouncements by prominent members of the foreign policy establishment in the Republican party and by the shifts in the media coverage of the campaign. Despite his various shortcomings, including his contradictory statements on the war in Iraq, the predominant view was that Kerry was best suited to restore American credibility on the imperialist terrain and allow an opportunity to salvage the situation in Iraq for U.S. imperialism. The fact that there had been so much confusion and dissension within the bourgeoisie on this reflected a real difficulty to act in the national interest in the face of the conditions of the social decomposition of capitalism. The fact that the consensus came so late in the campaign weakened the bourgeoisie in its ability to manipulate the electoral outcome.
Second, the growth and cohesion of the Christian fundamentalist right wing in America, which like religious zealotry everywhere in this period is a response to the increasing chaos and loss of hope for the future that characterizes social decomposition, posed serious difficulties to the ruling class. This group, first cultivated as a base for the Republicans in the Reagan years, has grown large in many of the less populated, rural states (the so-called “red states” in media parlance), and is characterized by its anachronistic social conservatism and control by local clergymen. This segment of the electorate proved impervious to media manipulation on the essential political questions of the campaign such as the economy, the war, international policy, or cronyism, especially a media manipulation that began so late in the campaign. These fundamentalists voted based on issues like gay marriage and abortion, and contributed significantly to the bourgeoisie’s ability to re-adjust its political division of labor. As one CNN commentator noted with incredulity on election night, despite the fact that Ohio had lost 250,000 jobs, there was a disastrous war in Iraq, and Kerry had won three face-to-face debates, still the social conservatives in Ohio had thrown the election to Bush.
As decomposition continues to accelerate, the U.S. ruling class has joined other capitalist nations, like France, in its difficulties in controlling the electoral charade.
As we have pointed out previously in Internationalism, Kerry was not an anti-war candidate. He merely promised to be more sensitive as to how he takes the U.S. into war, to win in Iraq, to expand the American military, to increase the size of American Special Forces units, and modernize weapons systems. This was not the political program of a dove. Kerry’s program coincided with the view of a growing majority within the bourgeoisie that recognizes the seriousness of the mess in Iraq. The Bush administration’s refusal to face reality undercut its credibility and increasingly made Bush’s continuance in office untenable. From the bourgeoisie’s perspective, Kerry alone offered the possibility of being able to convince the population to accept further military excursions in the future.
If Kerry’s campaign appeared to falter during the summer after the Democratic Convention, it was because he did not clearly assert a critique of the Bush administration on the war, implausibly insisting he would have still supported the invasion of Iraq even if he known that all the reasons justifying the invasion were wrong. He was criticized for this inconsistency in the editorial pages of the New York Times for example. It was only after Kerry’s speech at New York University in September in which he changed position and embraced the view that Iraq was the wrong war at the wrong time that his support within the bourgeoisie began to solidify. Already at the convention in July, a dozen retired admirals and generals had endorsed him, including three former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In September, Republican Senator Richard Lugar, the chair of the Foreign Relations committee, openly criticized the Bush administration for incompetence in Iraq. Another Republican, Sen. Chuck Hagel, the second ranking Republican on the same committee, also lashed out at Bush’s handling of Iraq. And even, Republican Sen. John McCain, while still avowing support for Bush’s candidacy, also criticized the administration for not leveling with the nation on Iraq. When leading Republicans openly attack their own candidate on the central foreign policy issue of the day just five weeks before the presidential election, it gives a real glimpse of the thinking of the bourgeoisie. The Democrats of course quickly took out a full page campaign in major newspapers featuring photographs of these leading Republicans and excerpts from their anti-Bush statements.
The media quickly followed suit, its coverage shifting on balance to support of the Kerry candidacy, as could be seen in the coverage of the debates and their aftermath, which portrayed Kerry as the winner. At the same time, an ABC News policy memo surfaced, which argued that while both candidates were distorting and stretching the truth in their campaign speeches and political commercials, Kerry’s distortion tended to involve only peripheral issues, but Bush’s dealt with issues at the heart of the campaign. The memo instructed ABC journalists to highlight these gross distortions in their coverage. One media commentator even noted a shift in coverage by the pro-Bush media controlled by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp – Fox News and New York Post (see accompanying article on the media [3]).
The capitalist propaganda barrage that accompanies each electoral circus always promotes the democratic mystification, the capitalist political swindle that tries to convince the working class that its participation in choosing the particular politician who will formally preside over the capitalist class dictatorship for the next few years means that it is free. While it is fashionable this year for journalists, politicians, pundits, professors, and clergymen to proclaim that this is the most important election in a generation or in our lifetime, one must note that similar claims were made in many previous elections. From the perspective of the democratic mystification, there is no such thing as an “unimportant” election.
This year the media blitz was awesome. The war in Iraq, national security, terrorism, civil liberties, chronic unemployment, medical care, social security, abortion, gay marriage, the environment – were all invoked as hot button issues, the better to get people interested in voting.
But despite the hoopla, like all elections in the period of capitalist decadence, this election was not really about the clash of alternative policies advocated by different factions of the bourgeoisie, but about manipulation and mystification. Certainly there are differences within the bourgeoisie but these disputes are confined primarily to tactical questions on how best to implement a shared strategic outlook internationally and domestically. It was already pre-ordained that regardless of who the victor was, the U.S. would continue a policy of austerity at home (making the working class pay the brunt of the economic crisis) and military intervention abroad (making the working class risk the lives of its young men and women to protect US imperialist interests), regardless of the winner. The style in which these policies are implemented may differ slightly, but the end result – austerity and war – will be the same.
On the level of political strategy, the ruling class this year had two primary political imperatives:
1) It needed to revive and repair the credibility of the democratic mystification which suffered a heavy blow in the debacle of the 2000 election.
2) It needed to adjust the capitalist political division of labor between the major political parties, making sure that the team formally in power is best suited to carry out the strategic requirements necessary to defend effectively the needs of the ruling class in the period ahead. These needs include a) the implementation of the ruling class’s agreed upon imperialist strategy designed to block the rise of any rival superpower in Europe or Asia, and b) the continued implementation of austerity, attacking the standard of living of the proletariat, making it bear the brunt of capitalism’s global economic crisis.
The 2000 election outcome wasn’t resolved for 36 days – determined only by a controversial Supreme Court decision, reached along narrowly divided partisan political lines, which deeply eroded political confidence in the court and the Bush presidency. For the first time in the modern era, the candidate who lost the popular vote won the presidency by gaining a majority in the antiquated Electoral College, based on the chaotic mess in Florida, the state controlled by George Bush’s brother (Governor Jeb Bush). The whole thing was more reminiscent of what one would expect of a third world banana republic rather than the most powerful democracy in the world. The 2000 debacle was a reflection of the effects of social decomposition on the ruling class' electoral process, which has made it increasingly difficult for the bourgeoisie to control its own sham electoral circus. In fact, the political strategy of the bourgeoisie in 2000, which was to keep the Democrats in office actually worked. Gore received 500,000 more votes in the popular balloting. His loss by 500 votes in Florida was attributable to a variety of miscues, ranging from confusing ballots, disenfranchisement of voters who typically voted for Democratic candidates (African Americans), and outright fraud. Once the recount process began, the capitalist politicians lost all sense of self-control and propriety. Each side adopted an irrational attitude to win at any cost, with no-holds barred squabbling. This loss of ruling class discipline and decorum stood in sharp contrast to the more mature and responsible comportment of Richard Nixon in 1960, for example, when he decided not to initiate a court challenge against Kennedy’s election due to voting fraud in Chicago. Nixon understood better his role in the electoral circus and put the interests of the “nation” above his own partisan desires to win the White House.
This year the bourgeoisie needed to restore confidence in elections. To do so, it needed a decisive victory at the polls in order to avoid any repeat of the ugliness of four years ago. The media has been very successful in spreading propaganda about the importance of each citizen’s vote – the idea that every vote counts is crucial in getting as many people as possible to participate in the electoral sham. To keep the pressure on for people to go to the polls, the media incessantly portrayed the contest as too close to call, keeping the tension alive and serving the purpose of making sure that no one lost interest in the race.. The campaign was incredibly effective on certain levels. In the battleground state of Iowa, the media reported that every eligible voter has been registered to vote. In Ohio, another swing state, the campaign has been so successful that there are an estimated 120,000 more people registered to vote than are eligible – either some people registered more than once or the ghosts of citizens past were lining up to vote. In the end nearly 120 million people went to the polls, setting a record for participation (though this was still around only 65% of the eligible voting population).
Had Kerry carried the state of Ohio, he would have emerged as the winner of the presidential election, giving the U.S. for the second time in a row a president who had lost the popular vote (this time by an even bigger margin than Bush in 2000 – 3 million as compared to 500,000), which would have been disastrous for the democratic mystification. This is what prompted Kerry not to push for the counting of the disputed provisional and absentee ballots in Ohio, or demanding a recount, for which there was ample justification. The New York Times reported four days after the election that some of the new electronic voting machines had registered 3,200 votes for Bush in one Ohio district, even though there were only 800 voters who had actually cast ballots. In thus making this decision, from the perspective of the bourgeoisie, Kerry acted “responsibly” in the same way that Nixon had declined to dispute the Kennedy election in 1960, deciding against a course of action that would have potentially contributed to political instability.
However, despite the large turnout and the responsible behaviour of Kerry, the democratic mystification still suffered a serious setback for the bourgeoisie. Among large sectors of the population, the “anybody but Bush” campaign had become a real crusade, an opportunity to correct a serious political blunder in American political history. Unprecedented numbers of volunteers, from rock stars to everyday citizens, got caught up in this crusade and traveled to the so-called battleground states from other parts of the country to campaign for Kerry. In the large, urbanized, industrial states, the media campaign was largely successful. In New York City, Kerry received 75% of the votes, in Philadelphia, 80%, and in Washington, DC, 90%. Kerry carried the industrial states of the northeast, Midwest and far west. The failure of the bourgeoisie's media campaign to shift the political division of labor to the Democrats resulted in widespread frustration, even depression, at how such a democratic movement could have failed to dislodge an unpopular president, and risks triggering widespread disillusion in the electoral process. The Canadian government reported a 600 percent increase in American citizen requests for information about immigrating to Canada the day after the election. New Zealand and Australia also report a tremendous jump in such requests.
Because of the proletariat’s continuing difficulties in breaking free of the disorientation that has characterized the reflux in class consciousness since the collapse of the Russian bloc, the bourgeoisie has considerable flexibility in deciding whether to put its left team (Democrats) or right team (Republicans) in power. In times of intense class struggle, the bourgeoisie often prefers to keep the left in opposition, as a means of controlling and derailing working class discontent. But today this is not a necessity – the left is equally capable of implementing austerity, beefing up the repressive apparatus, and waging imperialist war without jeopardizing its ability to control the working class. The Clinton administration demonstrated that amply.
The central consideration for the bourgeoisie today in the U.S, as it has been for more than a decade now, is not how to contain the class struggle, but rather the defense of its imperialist interests in a drastically changed international arena in the post-cold war period. While there is a general agreement within the dominant factions of the American capitalist class on the strategic goal of maintaining U.S. imperialist hegemony and preventing the emergence of any new imperialist rival, there are significant controversies over the tactical implementation of that strategy. Most notably this dispute has focused on the war in Iraq for the past year. In the winter of 2003, the ruling class was united on invading Iraq as reminder of American supremacy aimed at potential rivals, as a reinforcement of direct American military presence in a strategically important zone of imperialist competition, and as a means to put pressure on Europe by establishing a growing American control of Mideast oil supplies. As the ICC predicted on numerous occasions, this strategy was doomed to failure because in the phase of capitalist decomposition the dominant characteristic is the tendency for each nation state to play its own card on the inter-imperialist terrain, which results inevitably in growing chaos on the international level. In this period, every venture that U.S. imperialism undertakes ultimately aggravates the very circumstances that it aimed to combat, increasing rather than decreasing the level of chaos in the world and the challenges to U.S. hegemony.
The divergences on Iraq within the American bourgeoisie emerged only after the abject failure of the Iraq invasion. There are today three positions within the American ruling class on Iraq: 1) the situation is going well, and the U.S. needs only to stay the course, a position defended by the Bush administration, and one that seems to contradict blatantly the reality on the ground; 2) the situation is a mess, and the US should withdraw immediately – an extreme position defended by a few elements on the left and others on the right; 3) the situation is a mess, and the US must find a way to minimize the damage of the Iraq quagmire in order to be able to respond effectively to new challenges to use hegemony, a position increasingly defended by the dominant factions of the ruling class.
The utter failure of the Bush administration’s propaganda justifications for the Iraq invasion raised concern for the ruling class not because they were lies (the bourgeoisie, left or right, is united on the necessity to lie), but because their exposure has made it increasingly difficult to prepare popular acceptance for future military adventures, particularly within the proletariat. Bush’s ineptness squandered the considerable political capital gained from the 9/11 attacks, which had given the bourgeoisie an opportunity to use patriotism to manipulate the population at large. But now patriotism has once again become increasingly identified with the political right, as Kerry noted in his acceptance speech at the Democratic Party Convention when he promised to reclaim patriotism for the left as well.
As we pointed out in Internationalism n°131, the controversy over Bush’s unilateralism versus Kerry’s alleged multilateralism was “a gross distortion. Ever since World War II, US imperialism has always acted unilaterally in the defense of its imperialist interests as a superpower (…) As the head of the bloc, the US was easily able to oblige its subordinates in the bloc to go along with their decisions…”
Having failed to readjust the political division of labor through the electoral circus, the bourgeoisie will be forced to make the best of a difficult situation in the period ahead. Bush will face pressure to abandon his early rhetoric of “a mandate” in the election giving him a free hand to pursue more of the same. There will be tremendous pressure to develop a more realistic assessment of the situation in Iraq and to adjust policy in a way more consistent with what Kerry advocated. Already there is talk of a shake-up in the cabinet. It is contrary to the interests of American capitalist class to have the population so badly divided as this election demonstrated and something will have to be done about it.
J. Grevin, Nov. 5, 2004
George W. Bush’s foreign policy in regard to imperialist alliances has come to symbolize American imperialism’s historical break with its former allies in the so-called “old Europe”. The Democratic candidate, John Kerry, campaigned on a promise at this level to restore the past status quo, to mend fences with the “dear friends” of Europe that Bush’s reckless cowboy policies had supposedly so much alienated. However, even if Kerry had won, and his statements on this issue had been more than campaign gimmicks, any improved relations with Europe on the bases of a new face in the White house would have been destined for a very short honeymoon.
It became fashionable in the bizarre atmosphere of the presidential election campaign to blame Bush and his friends for whatever has gone wrong with America’s standing in the world. In particular the Democratic candidate, echoed by a great part of the media, has peddled the idea that the Bush administration is somehow responsible for the present rift between the US and the Western European powers headed by Germany and France. Nothing could be further from the truth. The confrontation between Europe and the US that has come so clearly to the open during the Bush administration in the last couple of years, in particular in relation to the question of Iraq, goes back to long before Bush came to power. In fact this rift, far from being a circumstantial event, produced by the style of a particularly foolish president, is rooted in the upheavals of the end of the 80’s and the beginning of the 90’s that completely changed the relation of forces between states that had existed up to then for over half a century. The historical collapse of the Stalinist imperialist bloc led by Russia at the end of 1989 was soon followed by the breaking apart of the Western imperialist bloc that the US headed since the end of WWII. The disappearance of the military alliances that have dominated every major event at the level of imperialist confrontations between nation states in the world arena for over 50 years did not mean the beginning of a “new world order” – in the words of Bush the father – of a revitalized capitalism and democracy. On the contrary, free of the discipline imposed by the existence of the military blocs and impelled by the deepening of the economic crisis, every state has since tried to play its own imperialist card causing a free-fall of world capitalism into a growing state of the barbarism of war and political chaos. The European nation states, some of the most powerful economies of the world, felt compelled to defend and extend their own imperialist interests just as much as anybody else. This has been so for France, but is particularly true for Germany, which as a loser in WW II had seen its world status diminished for over five decades.
The collapse of the Stalinist imperialist bloc also meant the demise of the USSR “superpower,” leaving Russia to play a totally lessened role in the world arena. However this was not the case for the leader of the other bloc. The disintegration of the Western bloc did not mean the direct weakening of the USA. On the contrary, the end of the bloc system left the US as the only remaining “superpower” and thus the world hegemonic imperialist nation. This fact has in great part determined the way in which the imperialist confrontations have taken place around the world in the last 14 years. On one side, any nation that wants to expand its influence has to do so at the cost of challenging directly or indirectly the American dominance over the world. On the other hand the US bourgeoisie can’t afford to fail to respond to its competitors with a permanent political, economic and military offensive to outplay its enemies. The first Gulf war under Bush the father, just as the present Iraq war under Bush the son and the wars in the Balkans under the Democratic Clinton administration are all part of this dynamic of imperialist confrontation between the US and the challengers of its hegemony, and first among them the imperialist powers of western Europe. In fact as we have said many times in relation to the Iraq war, the real objective of this US military adventure has never been the “destruction of weapons of mass destruction”, the “liberation of the Iraqi people from a brutal dictator”, “the war on terrorism”, or ….any other lie put forward by the dominant class. The enemy that George Bush and friends were addressing with the invasion of Iraq was located somewhere else: in Europe, where the real danger to American dominance is centered. In this sense there is nothing surprising in the fact that Germany and France have been the most vociferous opponents of the war, the French and the German bourgeoisie know very well what is at stake in this American military adventure.
The historical situation is leading not to less, but to an ever growing confrontation between the major imperialist powers and this will not change with or without a new face in the White House.
Eduardo Smith.