Liberal politicians upped the volume of their claims last week that the case is about disagreements with the White House over Washington’s Iraq policy and its rationale for the war. That’s sheer demagogy. The only alternative Democratic politicians have offered to the Bush administration’s course in Iraq is to propose deploying more troops and getting more allies on board for the imperialist military operation. This lack of alternatives within the bourgeoisie to the course of the war party—the great majority of Democratic and Republican officeholders—makes the crisis in ruling circles worse.

The Libby indictment is a product of increasing factionalism both between and within the dominant parties of capitalism and their peripheries. Just when the rulers need stability, self-confidence, and a bipartisan core “all good people” can agree on, the opposite is happening. The growing polarization among the wealthy families that rule the United States is as much an element of the new political period we have entered as the increased readiness of sections of the working class to resist the bosses’ offensive against our wages and job and living conditions.

The crisis of confidence of the U.S. rulers is rooted in their mounting financial and economic vulnerability, the political and military challenges Washington confronts worldwide, and the sharpening class conflict these conditions generate. America’s propertied ruling families and their political representatives in both the Democratic and Republican parties have become increasingly conscious of the need to use both the economic and military power of U.S. imperialism. Gone is the illusion that the outcome of the Cold War was a victory in itself that would bring global stability under the domination of Pax Americana. The rulers sense the uncontrollable forces carrying them toward a future of sharpening crises, marked by depression, war, and violent class battles.

The frustration born of a vague but growing awareness of this vulnerability, combined with the inability to find a self-confident course to decisively overcome it, is the single greatest source of the deepening factionalism, demagogy, and degradation of political discourse—its pornographication—that characterize all bourgeois politics in the United States today.

This coarsening of politics has been displayed in the recent sensational exchanges between many editors and reporters. The New York Times is in the midst of this, with Times journalist Judith Miller at the center of the Libby affair. The personal attacks on Miller by Times columnist Maureen Dowd, such as her article “The Woman of Mass Destruction,” and the related rebuttals, are also telling about the crisis and degeneration of the daily claiming to publish “all the news that’s fit to print,” and of the rest of the big-business media.

The problem with the capitalists, their political representatives, and their mouthpieces, however, is not that they are immoral, hypocritical people as individuals. The scandal mongering is fueled largely by the far right and the left within bourgeois politics to profit from middle-class insecurities and drag workers along with the declining bourgeoisie itself down into the pit of resentment and salacious envy. This became the stock-in-trade of the Nazis in the 1920s and ’30s.

As millions of workers see the ruling class and its parties become more unanimous in carrying out not only wars abroad but a war on working people at home—while fighting among themselves over meaningless scandals—they resist these assaults. In the process vanguard workers get politicized. They become more open to the idea that we need to build a working-class party based on the unions that can fight for the interests of the oppressed and exploited worldwide.
 
 
Related articles:
White House official faces 30 years in jail for perjury
New hero of liberals: frame-up expert
Patrick Fitzgerald helped convict Lynne Stewart  
 
 
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