BY ARGIRIS MALAPANIS
On February 12 the U.S. Senate acquitted President William
Clinton of both articles of impeachment the House of
Representatives had earlier approved.
The conclusion of the trial, however, did not bring to an end the crisis of the ruling class that has become evident in the year-long scandal. The five-week-long Senate trial brought into the open the contradictions that have plagued the bourgeoisie - contradictions that reflect the growing instability of the world capitalist system and the decline in confidence in its leading personnel.
While Clinton got off scot free, the U.S. presidency has been weakened. The ruling class does not come out stronger or more united to face what they anticipate will be a social and economic crisis that could easily get out of their control. This is unlike the Watergate scandal and resignation of then- president Richard Nixon, which put the rulers on a stronger footing to reverse the blows U.S. imperialism had suffered from its defeat in Vietnam and from the upsurge in the struggle for Black rights at home.
"I wonder if after this cultural war is over... an America will survive that's worth fighting for," commented a rather dispirited Henry Hyde, the Republican head of the House judiciary committee that crafted the articles of impeachment, at the end of the trial. Hyde and other pushers of the impeachment campaign, such as Senate majority leader Trent Lott, are now well known for having courted "white citizens only" groups, such as the Council of Conservative Citizens, that extol the virtues of the slaveholders' Confederacy in the South.
The rightist effort to cram the ultimate goals of their "cultural war" down the throats of working people through the impeachment campaign largely failed. Ultrarightist politician Patrick Buchanan popularized the term "cultural war" in 1992, to describe an ideological offensive aimed at reversing affirmative action, school desegregation, a woman's right to choose abortion - in short, to turn the country back to what it was before the 1960s.
Sensing that the real target of the impeachment campaign was not Clinton but gains toilers have made in struggle, a majority of working people steadfastly opposed the drive to oust the president from office. The effort to use the cultural war to take what the rulers have been unable to wrest on the field of direct class conflict came up short.
At the same time, ultrarightist politicians, who were the motor force of the impeachment drive, made headway in institutionalizing the pornographication of politics - that is "exposing" the dissoluteness and corruption of the "elite" to exacerbate and profit from middle-class insecurities and to suck workers into the mire of the politics of resentment.
The events of the last year have coarsened politics, argued a front-page article in the February 13 New York Times, which was carried by other dailies. "Among the news media, a ravenous appetite for scandal has developed. More salacious details about politicians have been talked about and written about that at any time in modern history."
In the Senate trial, 10 Republicans defected from their party's majority, voting against the charge that Clinton committed perjury in connection to statements he made to a grand jury about his affair with former White House employee Monica Lewinsky. Five Republicans also opposed the charge of obstruction of justice. All Democrats voted to acquit.
No public celebrations greeted the outcome, though, among liberals or other ruling circles. Many capitalist politicians and pundits argued that the executive branch came out of the ordeal weakened.
"The presidency is a weaker office today than it was on Jan. 20, 1993, when Mr. Clinton first assumed it," said the lead article in the "Week in Review" section of the Sunday, February 14, New York Times.
New York Democratic senator Patrick Moynihan argued during the Senate trial that "impeachment is a power singularly lacking any of the checks and balances on which the framers depended. It is solely a power of the Congress. Do not doubt that it could bring radical instability of the American government."
Appearing with Republican senator John McCain on the February 14 NBC news program "Meet the Press," Moynihan warned that the White House runs the risk of accelerating this political instability if it goes after "revenge" against those who pushed the campaign to oust Clinton.
"The failed impeachment of Andrew Johnson left a wounded, weakened Presidency, one that lasted many years," stated Arthur Schlesinger, a former White House adviser during the presidency of John F. Kennedy, "and I think the failed impeachment of Bill Clinton will do the same thing."
A number of Republican politicians sulked over in the outcome of the impeachment drive. "I will report to you that the good news is that the rich people and the business people still like us," said John Rowland, governor of Connecticut, addressing the Republican Leadership Council in Miami February 14. "But that's about it. Unless they can vote four or five times each, we've got some problems in the next couple of campaigns."
Meanwhile, ultrarightist politicians who were the most uncompromising in pushing for Clinton's ouster appear to have some political wind in their sails.
As the impeachment trial concluded on February 12, Patrick Buchanan appeared on that night's McLaughlin Group TV show. He stood by those Republicans who were adamant for removing Clinton from office. "They're the guys who can look back on this and say, `We did the honorable thing,' " Buchanan said.
By the end of the program, it became evident that Buchanan will run for president again in the 2000 elections. "Pat Buchanan will occupy his McLaughlin Group chair for not more than one month, and then he will hear the distant call for `Hail to the Chief' and `President Patrick J. Buchanan!' " John McLaughlin predicted. "Distant drummer," responded Buchanan.
Buchanan's goal is not simply to get votes but to win cadre for an incipient fascist movement that some in the ruling class consider will be necessary to face what they anticipate will be an economic and social crisis that will get out of their control. "America may be relishing the longest peacetime expansion in history, but the gathering global disaster is now visible to all," wrote Buchanan in a January 27 syndicated column, pushing his nationalist, "America First" demagogy. "Japan, two-thirds of the Asian economy, is awash in debt and headed, say economists, for a `hard landing.... Brazil, two-thirds of South America's economy, has seen its currency fall 30 percent in 10 days.... We have postponed the day of reckoning; we shall not evade it."
This unfolding crisis of overproduction of world capitalism is fueling interimperialist competition and new attempts by Washington to maintain its hegemony as the world's number one military and economic power. That's why a central point in Clinton's January State of the Union speech was his version of an anti-ballistic missile defense system that would give Washington first-strike nuclear capacity - directed as much against China as against the former Soviet Union -and proposals for the largest increase in U.S. military spending since the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Clinton presented this along with proposals that open the way for privatizing Social Security.
Rightist politicians and pundits have grabbed the liberals' proposals and are calling for more. The front page of the February 22 National Review advertises the special feature of that issue of the right-wing magazine: "The SDI imperative; the hows and whys of missile defense."
In these articles, William Buckley, Jeane Kirpatrick, and others on the right seize on Clinton's State of the Union speech and argue that the White House's plan is simply a belated attempt to carry out Reagan's "Star Wars" program, demanding more and faster. And the Republican party leadership unveiled their plan for "saving Social Security" February 16, which attempts to push farther Clinton's proposals by institutionalizing private accounts for social security benefits that would be invested in the stock market.
The main dilemma among the U.S. rulers remains how to wrest in the field of direct class battle the gains they've been unable to take from working people - in the United States and around the world - by other means.