Right-wing coup that shames America
Ezekiel J. Krahlin
Right-wing coup that shames America
http://www.observer.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,415283,00.html
THe Observer, London
Continuing unofficial counts reveal the full extent of Al Gore's lead
and the massive abuses that have put George W. Bush into power
Will Hutton
Sunday December 24, 2000
I never thought I would live to see it. There has been a right-wing
coup in the United States. It is now clear beyond any doubt that the
winner of the Presidential election was Al Gore. In Florida the votes
are being counted unofficially in a way the Supreme Court would not
permit: he was already 140 votes ahead when counting stopped for
Christmas and his final lead promises to be in the thousands.
Nationally he leads by over half a million votes. What has happened is
beyond outrage. It is the cynical misuse of power by a conservative
elite nakedly to serve its interests - and all of us should be
frightened for the consequences.
The issue is not George W. Bush's conservatism, opponent though I am
of what Bush plans to do; a democracy only has vitality and political
tension if its philosophy and stream of thinking is articulated and
pitches to win elections. The incontrovertible abuse is that Bush has
won power despite losing, and critically he only pulled off this feat
because the Republicans control the Supreme Court. The Right has
subverted pivotal US institutions to win power - a campaign of which
the discrediting and attempted impeachment of Clinton was part - and
in the process disgraced the legitimacy of US democracy at home and
abroad, and undermined conceptions of the rule of law. It is a poor
augury for the twenty-first century.
In Britain the response has been woeful - itself a token of our own
lack of hard democratic instincts. The commentary, especially in the
right-of-centre press, has been to decry Gore as a poor loser and to
insist that he had to accept the rules of the electoral game,
respecting the votes in the US electoral college which, when Florida
was lost, gave Bush the election. But as the great liberal defenders
of freedom, Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin, both argued when unjust,
illegitimate governments win power through subverting the rules it is
our responsibility to contest them.
The nine-member Supreme Court, apart from the heady decade of the
1960s when it advanced the cause of civil rights in the South, has
always been a bastion of a regressive conservatism. In the 1930s it
tried to rule that key elements in Roosevelt's New Deal were
unconstitutional. Its defence of the sovereignty of states rights has
been fundamental in extending capital punishment and allowing
bible-belt states to resist implementing federal legislation banning
violence against women. Yet its general prohibition in interfering in
a state's rights has been overturned in one instance; the highly
politicised intervention in Florida.
The more you examine it, the more outrageous the now famous judgement
was. What the Court had to do to serve its political purpose was to
find a way of acknowledging a sovereign state's rights and the
continuing legitimacy of hand recounts in closely contested elections
- after all George W. Bush had passed a law as Governor in Texas in
1998 endorsing hand recounts - but at the same time give the election
to their Republican champion by finding that events in Florida were a
special case.This was tricky. In the first place, even the
conservative judges shared the unanimous view that it was reasonable
for hand recounts to be undertaken because, as the judgment concedes:
'Punch card balloting machines can produce an unfortunate number of
ballots which are not punched in a clean, complete way by the voter.'
Consequently individual states are obliged, when the winning margin is
tight, to
mount an effort to find out what the 'clear intent' of each voter was.
In other words Gore was completely within his rights to demand the
hand recount.
The five conservatives had a problem. How could they deliver the coup?
The solution was elegant. The process was too subjective, said the
Supreme Court, unless the Florida court put in place even more
protective measures to ensure impartiality than the Florida
legislature had provided for - a position that is constitutionally
impossible, as the judges knew, because it meant the Court would have
to change rather than interpret Florida law. Hand recounts are thus
legal in principle but impossible in practice because of possible
partiality. And in a telling aside in its judgment, the Court said
that hand recounts would 'cast a cloud' over Bush's 'legitimacy' that
would harm 'democratic stability'. It never crossed the five-strong
conservative majority's mind that the opposite might be the case; that
not counting votes which would give Gore the presidency when
nationally he had won half a
million more votes than Bush would damage, not democratic stability,
but the entire democratic principle.
But then right-wing America is not much interested in the democratic
principle. It believes that its duty is to sustain America in its
unique destiny as a Christian guardian of individual liberty, a place
- I joke not - that will deserve Christ's second coming. It sees
itself in a holy war against a liberal enemy within, and its uses
every tool at its disposal ruthlessly to dispose of its foe.
The Right enjoyed 12 years of power under Reagan and Bush, lost the
Presidency to Clinton in 1992 when Ross Perot split the conservative
vote and pledged to continue their jihad against what they saw as his
illegitimate victory from the beginning. Hence the fantasies of
Whitewater. Hence the Starr inquiry into the Lewinsky affair, where
now we learn key evidence was fabricated. Hence the attempted
impeachment. Mud sticks, they reckoned, and even though they knew
impeachment would fail, they calculated it would put any Democrat
presidential candidate in 2000 in a presentational bind - association
with the successful Clinton years would be attacked as an association
with immorality.
But for all their efforts American public opinion remained stubbornly
tolerant, sceptical of tax cuts and moderately centrist. To win Bush
had to outspend his rival two to one in the last month and build on
the strategic dilemma faced by Gore about the Clinton years. But even
then it has taken the Supreme Court to complete the coup.
For all the talk of reconciliation Bush is building a tribal
conservative administration bent on supporting business at home and
asserting US unilateralism abroad. His next Treasury Secretary has
been picked not for his capacity to negotiate the US and the world
through the minefield of a fragile international financial system, but
his interest in feathering the nests of corporate America. And so it
goes on, offering the US and the world a policy and perspective not
wanted by the majority of Americans.
The consensus view is that within months the whole Florida affair will
be forgotten, and Bush will be installed as a legitimate US President.
I don't agree. The value of democracies is they produce
administrations broadly in tune with the times and will of the people,
and thus able to marshal both consent and the correct policy responses
for the varying crises that hit them.
Not so in America. Whether the need to respect international treaties
abroad or the desire to universalise medical protection at home, the
US has the man in power it did not want and whose instincts are
opposite to those of the majority. This will prove a disastrous
administration for America and the world, and the coup will become
widely understood as a moment of partisan infamy. It is a brutal
lesson for us liberals. Never, never forget the treachery and poison
on the Right.
---end of article
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