Before Clinton entered the White House he was groomed by the liberal wing of the ruling class to carry out a bipartisan shift to the right on domestic policy. He became and has remained president as the death-penalty man. The "end-welfare- as-we-know-it" man. The man who signed the Defense of Marriage Act, which bans same-sex marriages, a flagrant intrusion by the state into people's private lives. The man who has turned the hated la migra into an armed fortress of the government to push increasing numbers of immigrant workers into pariah status. Clinton is now leading, in the faithful traditions of modern liberalism, U.S. imperialism's march toward war.
But Clinton is not being attacked from the right for being a warmaker or for trampling on the rights working people have won in struggle. The impeachment offensive has the same aims as the "cultural war" that's the stock-in-trade of incipient fascist politicians like Patrick Buchanan: to drag the working class into the pit of the politics of resentment and economic nationalism along with the declining capitalist class. That's exactly what the Nazis pushed in the 1920s and early 1930s, as they decried the "filth" of the Weimar Republic.
As this salacious saga unfolds, bourgeois politicians of all stripes attempt to sow confusion among working people about the alleged virtues of "representative democracy," that is, imperialist democracy. Buchanan's January 5 column, for example, arguing for a trial and ousting of Clinton was titled "The Constitution cannot be circumvented."
The complicated system of "checks and balances," of which impeachment is one device, was crafted into the U.S. Constitution not to guarantee majority rule, but precisely to prevent it. The entire constitution was based on the twin principles of protection of private property and rule by the wealthy minority. The impeachment provision was included for mediating and resolving competing interests among the rulers. The "Founding Fathers" gave the population no vote on whether to remove a president from office before the end of four years, jealously reserving such a powerful weapon for themselves.
When the AFL-CIO tops, liberal civil rights groups, or organizations such as the Communist Party USA support Clinton politically, or at least as a "lesser evil," while opposing impeachment, they not only support the system that is the source of the long-term rightward movement in bourgeois politics in the U.S., they are helping the right wing win influence. Giving any political credence to the liberal warmakers allows the right wing to be the predominant pressure on the Democratic administration and gives unnecessary victories to the rightists.
The only way to fight Buchananism or Trent Lottism effectively is by opposing Clinton and liberalism uncompromisingly and building a working-class movement that can take the moral high ground and forge a proletarian party that can lead the toilers to take power out of the hands of the warmakers. The struggles by Black farmers against discrimination and for land and the numerous battles by trade unionists, such as the 98-day strike by coal miners who came out stronger through the fight against Freeman in Illinois, are producing a new working-class vanguard with the capacity to achieve this goal.