Column: Black World
November 1998

Fight Right's onslaught in '98 election

Lou Turner

The vicious right-wing assault on what's left of the meager social agenda of the Democratic Party coalition of civil rights, labor, women's and social advocacy organizations for the poor and working class this election year is cause for great alarm. The serious political consequences of a right-wing Republican sweep in key elections this November seems to have flown beneath the political radar of Black and left forces. The demobilization of Black and working class America by Clinton Democrats virtually assures it.

Called the most "retrograde and ineffectual Congress" in recent memory by nothing less than the WASHINGTON POST (Oct. 19), the outgoing Republican-controlled 105th Congress has blocked legislation controlling the tobacco and managed health care industries, along with legislation to increase the minimum-wage and outlaw hate crimes.

According to a recently discovered House Republican leadership document, a section of which is entitled "Presidential Priorities the Congress Stopped," Republican leaders in the House of Representatives, working with Senate Majority leader Trent Lott of Mississippi, boasted that their successful killing of the Hate Crimes Bill was a "win for conservative priorities."

There is no more damning evidence of how ruling class politics contribute to the neo-fascist atmosphere now being felt throughout the country than the Republican leadership's characterization of the Hate Crimes Bill as a "proposal that criminalizes motive rather than punishes violent crime." In other words, even after James Byrd is dragged to his death and decapitated in Jasper, Texas, because he is Black, even after Matthew Shepard is brutally beaten to death in Wyoming because he is gay, Republicans feel it their bounded duty to protect the rights of home-grown neo-fascists from having their motives criminalized by "big-government."

It is all too easy, here, to now separate the horrors of this neo-fascism in American life from the more mundane anxieties over the economic crisis that the working class faces. This is the pitfall that all too many social movements and political organizations stumble into. As depraved as these inhuman acts of violence are, no less ominous is the deepening economic crisis, whose full effects are sure to be felt between now and the next election cycle, and how an even more entrenched Republican-controlled Congress is sure to respond to them.

While Congress and the President are already bailing out "too-big-to-fail" corporations and financial institutions, responding to the effects of the economic crisis on the conditions of life and labor of the working class could be left in the reactionary hands of an even more right-wing Congress after the November elections.

In its campaign to gain a veto-proof Senate, the Republican Right has especially targeted women Democrats elected in the 1992 election, liberal women like Carol Moseley-Braun in Illinois, Barbara Boxer in California, and Patti Murray in Washington state. Though Bill Clinton's sexual misadventures have emboldened the Right to intensify their reactionary onslaught, their aim being to complete the retrograde "Contract [on] America" they foisted upon the nation as a result of their 1994 mid-term election victory, Clinton is not the impetus.

Washington's politics of "sex, lies, and videotapes" only appears to be the Right's excuse for politics these days. Something more ominous lurks behind the bourgeoisie's tabloid politics. Rolling back the modest social agenda that "liberal" Clintonistas like Senator Moseley-Braun sponsored, sometimes with the support of Bill Clinton and often without it, is the over-riding aim of the Right. Just as Reagan and Bush's stacking of the federal courts with conservative judges was calculated to have far-reaching consequences into the next century, so the aim of the Republican Right is to lock up the Congress for the forseeable future.

Earlier this year, in an unguarded moment of radical candor, Julian Bond, following his election as chairman of the board of the NAACP, described the aim of this political retrogression as "the demobilization of effective insurgent politics, the depoliticizing of discussions of our gross maldistribution of income, and the adoption of reactionary and punitive social policy" (POVERTY & RACE, July/August 1998).

In the Illinois U.S. Senate race, the Republican Right has, without spending one dime, gotten a multimillionaire banking heir, Peter Fitzgerald, to take out Carol Moseley-Braun, the only African American in that lily-white institution, the U.S. Senate. Fitzgerald is spending $10 million of his own money to do just that, after having spent $6 million in a primary race in which even Republican state leaders like Illinois Governor Jim Edgar labeled him an extremist they couldn't support.

What they have no trouble supporting, however, is Fitzgerald's reactionary anti-labor, anti-civil rights, anti-woman and anti-human needs agenda. It was not coincidental that the reactionary columnist George Will's weighing into the Illinois race with an attack column against Moseley-Braun in the CHICAGO SUN-TIMES coincided with Fitzgerald's attack ad campaign. Will sees Illinois as "the bellwether state," in which the defeat of Carol Moseley-Braun would represent a giant step toward the Right gaining a veto-proof Senate.

The growing economic crisis and authoritarian police state that targets Black and working class communities has more often than not been aided by Clinton and the Republican-controlled Congress. Which is why we cannot ignore the positions Senator Moseley-Braun has taken as a Democrat following the lead of her party's leader, Bill Clinton.

Her 1996 trip to visit the late Nigerian military dictator General Sani Abacha came at a time when a growing movement around the world was solidarizing with the Nigerian working class trying to throw off Abacha's despotic rule. Senator Moseley-Braun has supported Clinton's "law-and-order" crime policy of putting 100,000 more cops in Black neighborhoods already under siege by the police at the very moment when a grassroots anti-police brutality movement is gaining momentum in Black and Latino communities across the country. The same can be said for her support for lowering the age at which juveniles can be treated as adults in the criminal justice system.

The Black community has by no means ignored these and other instances in which Black politicians like Moseley-Braun act in ways that go against the interests of Black working people. Indeed, the latest travesty of Black political betrayal was the Sept. 15 House vote for a resolution calling for the extradition of the Black revolutionary Assata Shakur from Cuba, a reactionary resolution that members of the Congressional Black Caucus either intentionally or ineptly voted for. (Find details and the lively discussion and campaign in support of Assata Shakur on the Internet.) The Black community also painfully recognizes the seriousness of the present moment and what's at stake in the '98 election.

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