Right after the 1992 presidential elections, a public meeting was organized in New York City in conjunction with a conference of the Socialist Workers Party’s National Committee and communist leaders from several other countries. At that public meeting, we said that what was most important about the bourgeoisie’s election campaign was the fact that it was not going to end with the counting of the ballots. "America First," the "culture war," building a wall along the border with Mexico--the themes of the ultrarightist Republican primary candidate Patrick Buchanan--continued to resound.

The campaign of Ross Perot--who ended up getting 19 percent of the popular vote--and his demagogic appeal to an insecure middle class was not a fleeting phenomenon in bourgeois politics, irrespective of Perot himself. In the course of the 1992 campaign, Clinton had already begun speaking Perot’s language, probing measures to erode the social wage won through the labor struggles of the 1930s and civil rights battles of the 1950s and 1960s. The Democratic nominee campaigned on the pledge to "end welfare as we know it."  
 
Coarsening rhetoric
Across the bourgeois political spectrum, this coarsening rhetoric--aimed at heightening resentment in the middle classes and undercutting social solidarity among working people--continued after the election, as we said it would. Two years into the Clinton presidency and two months after the election of a Republican majority in the U.S. Congress, an ideological battle still rages within the bourgeoisie, packaged in demagogy directed to the broader population.

How should the capitalists operate politically in this new period of economic crisis and growing instability? Why are the employers still so far from accomplishing what they need to do, even after more than a decade of assaults on real wages, employment levels, job conditions, and working hours? How can they break through obstacles to take qualitatively more? How can the bourgeoisie start marshaling arguments that will enable them--even if ever so cautiously at first--to chip away more significantly at the assumptions underlying Social Security itself? These are among the questions at the center of bourgeois politics in the United States today.

The bipartisan framework of bourgeois politics continues to move to the right. What is the net result, for example, of a Democratic president coming into office and pledging to do something about national health care? Two years later, working people are further away from the socialization of medical coverage than before--further away. That is the reality. But the same direction is true across the board. There is a bipartisan movement to the right--and in some important respects a convergence--in the economic and social legislative agendas of both bourgeois parties.

Advancing along this trajectory inevitably breeds rightist demagogy, because the efforts by the Democratic and Republican politicians to rationalize their policies end up feeding reactionary biases, fears, and resentments. No matter how particular politicians try to package their anti–working-class moves, it is rightist views that are given the biggest impulse by the fact of these moves itself....

Capitalism over the past couple of decades has at least doubled the official jobless rate that is considered "natural" in the United States, Europe, and most other imperialist countries. The numbers of workers no longer even counted as part of the labor force still continues to grow. At the same time, the capitalists have reduced unemployment benefits, held down the minimum wage, diminished the buying power of take-home pay, denied government funding for child care, and allowed welfare benefits to fall further and further behind price increases. Working people are being driven out of affordable housing, and medical and retirement benefits are being cut.

This is what capitalism is imposing on growing numbers in the working class today. And then politicians from both parties start branding those forced to live under these conditions as outlaws. They start talking about putting the children of the "underclass" into orphanages. They start denying workers unemployment benefits or welfare unless we accept jobs at a minimum or subminimum wage. They draw immigrants across the border to exploit cheap labor and then begin organizing to deny them schooling, medical care, and social benefits....

During the 1992 U.S. presidential campaign, the bourgeoisie’s two-party setup already began to show its tendency to disintegrate around the edges under the pressures we have been describing. And this process will continue. The first manifestations will not necessarily be recognizably fascist. Perot, for instance, is a Bonapartist demagogue who presses a generally right-wing political agenda, but his movement does not have the incipient fascist thrust of what Buchanan is trying to put together.

Whether it is Perot, Buchanan, or other figures and currents that carve out a niche in bourgeois politics, their initial target will not be to take the labor movement head on, or to go after revolutionary-minded workers and communists. In fact, many will demagogically speak on behalf of "the ordinary working man." Right now the ultrarightists are largely going after the Clinton administration, as well as those in their own milieu soft on these "New Deal–influenced" "globalist elites." They rail against those who are selling out "America" and "American workers." They condemn the "corrupt and decadent pretenders" to leadership of the nation among the spokespeople of the existing bourgeois parties, government institutions, and federal bureaucracy.

This is how political radicalization begins, as evidence of political weakness and moral bankruptcy mount in capitalist politics. And we should remember that forces coming from different directions in bourgeois politics can and do converge around radical demagogy of this kind. Buchanan and Perot, for example, converge with those such as the so-called consumer advocate Ralph Nader and Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn to rail against the North American Free Trade Agreement--all of them speaking more or less openly in "America First" terms, while shedding crocodile tears over the conditions of Mexican workers and farmers....  
 
‘More of a one party system’
Today, bourgeois politics in the United States is more of a one-party system than it has ever been in the lifetime of anyone in this hall. Not just in foreign policy, where the rulers have followed a bipartisan strategic course since the end of World War I, but in domestic economic and social policy as well.

I do not mean to exaggerate--the two-party face of the one-party system remains decisive for the bourgeoisie in fooling working people, and there is an extreme right wing within capitalist politics that shows substantial strength at each new turning point. But on defense of the dollar; on preparing for economic war against U.S. capital’s competitors; on cutting back social spending; on laying the basis to erode the social wage and limit universal entitlements; on "reviewing" and where necessary reversing affirmative action; on strengthening repressive legislation and the cops, including the border cops; on weakening the power of the unions to resist--on all these fundamental questions there is a common direction, regardless of the different voices in which Clinton and Gingrich speak.

I was struck in this regard by the speech Gingrich gave at the beginning of December to a gathering of Republicans in Congress, accepting their nomination as Speaker of the House. "If you truly love democracy and you truly believe in representative self-government, you can never study Franklin Delano Roosevelt too much," he said. "He did bring us out of the Depression. He did lead the Allied movement in World War II. In many ways he created the modern world. He was clearly, I think, as a political leader the greatest figure of the 20th century," Gingrich said.

"[A]nd if you go back and read the New Deal, they tried again and again. They didn’t always get it right, and we would have voted against much of it, but the truth is we would have voted for much of it."

Then Gingrich turned to Winston Churchill, who, he sermonized, "in 1940 in the darkest and grimmest days said, ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, sweat, toil and tears.’"

Roosevelt and Churchill. The two most prominent Allied war leaders during the second world imperialist slaughter. Both of them often portrayed as decisive individuals who in abnormal times stood above normal government functioning and got things done. That is who Gingrich offered up as models.

It is not that the Republicans are setting the line in Washington. It is that under today’s crisis conditions, a bipartisan imperialist political lodestar keeps being followed to the right. And the initiative increasingly comes from those who claim to speak directly to the American people, over and above workaday partisan politics. More and more of the initiative comes from those politicians who say the people must be mobilized against all those who have lost touch with the average American--against the insiders, against the elites, against the bureaucrats, against the politicians!

It makes no difference that their proposals are sheer demagogy. It is such voices within bourgeois politics that have held the initiative since the 1992 election and continue to do so today.  
 
 
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