Lead article
December 2000
Election turmoil exposes fault lines in U.S. society
by Olga Domanski
It appears we are now confronting a White House inhabited by the Christian
Coalition escorted by George W. Bush. How far from a mandate Bush will
have, however, is clear from the turmoil that has engulfed the nation ever
since the Nov. 7 presidential election revealed the enormous instability
underlying the most powerful nation on earth. It has torn away the facade
of American "democracy" and revealed the determination of the forces of
revolt to demand REAL democracy by making their voices heard.
The spontaneous way African Americans, Jews and Haitians took to the
streets in Florida within hours to protest the thwarting of their votes on
Nov. 7 puts fear in the hearts of all rulers. Their determination not to
let any such activity get out of hand is what defined the response of both
George W. Bush and Al Gore and tells the tale of the fate of bourgeois
democracy.
Far from reaching out to all those demanding to be heard in Florida and
throughout the land, Gore made it clear that he would fight on strictly
constitutional lines and reached out only to the courts to insist on a
manual recount of the contested votes.
Bush, on the other hand, was not restrained by any illusions about
bourgeois democracy. The minute the Florida Supreme Court ruled that the
manual recounts had to be included in the vote, he took TWO actions. One
was to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court to overrule the Florida court's
decision. The other was to unleash a mob of seasoned Republican goons to
rampage in storm-trooper fashion where ballots were being counted in
Miami-Dade County. It stopped the counting dead.
The figures that the Republican pit-bull Secretary of State Katherine
Harris announced as "certified," which Bush used to declare himself
president-elect on Nov. 26, were efficiently "cleansed," not only of the
Miami-Dade figures but of hundreds of other Florida votes that had been
expected to go to Gore.
DEEP DIVISIONS
The Nov. 7 elections made clear deep divisions of class, race, gender, age,
and geography. None can deny the way in which women came out in
disproportionately high numbers to vote against Bush because of his
chilling threat to women's rights, particularly if he should be the one to
choose the next three seats on the Supreme Court.
Most of all, none can deny the huge Black vote that took one battleground
state after another from Bush. Gore won Michigan thanks to getting 90% of
the Black vote as well as a large number of union voters, who had fought to
get election day off. The crucial nature of the Black vote became
abundantly clear in Illinois and Pennsylvania when the tide turned as
returns poured in from urban centers like Chicago and Philadelphia. The
Latino vote was similarly critical for Gore in New Mexico and California.
Nowhere was the pattern clearer than in Florida, where Gore won 93% of the
Black vote and Bush 57% of the white vote. Bush's supreme confidence that
he has most of the white vote enables him to arrogantly dismiss losing the
popular vote by more than 300,000.
It was precisely the deep Black opposition to Bush's reactionary plans that
brought forth the pattern of intimidation and outright disenfranchisement
unleashed in Florida during the election.
The battle gathered force in early spring, when a forum on Gov. Jeb Bush's
euphemistically dubbed "One Florida" plan was transformed into a civil
rights rally by thousands who protested the way he put into effect an
anti-affirmative action initiative by executive order. In February more
than 4,000 jammed into a room that seated only 1,700 and heard Black and
Hispanic speakers, many of them women, condemn the plan.
Over the next few weeks other large-scale protests took place. Students
from Florida A&M University sat in at the Capitol; eight new NAACP chapters
appeared on campuses; and Black female law students teamed up with white
women from NOW to organize more opposition. This culminated in March in a
50,000-strong "March of Conscience," called the largest civil rights
protest ever held in Florida.
By June a vigorous statewide crusade got underway to boost voter turnout of
racial minorities and women. The Republicans, who thought they had Florida
all sewn up, suddenly began worrying that it might not be so.
That set the stage for the kind of intimidation, disenfranchisement, and
ballot tampering that vies with the worst banana republic methods for
stealing an election. IDs of motorists were checked by police near some
polling places and Black voters turned away. Black college students with
registration cards in their hands were told their names were not on the
rolls. Ballots of military personnel that had been thrown out because they
were not properly filled out were taken home by Republican workers and
"fixed up." Spanish-speaking officials were sent to translate at stations
where the majority spoke only Creole, and vice versa.
The most contentious vote-stealing-and the only one that Gore fought
vigorously-concerned the Republican opposition to recounting ballots. This
reached the point in Miami-Dade County of Bush supporters physically
storming the office where ballots were being recounted.
'LEGALIZED' DISENFRANCHISEMENT
What was new in this election was not just the old-fashioned vote-stealing,
but many new kinds of disenfranchisement which Gore refused to attack.
Because he supports it, Gore could say not a word about the
disenfranchisement of 525,000 Florida citizens who were denied the right to
vote because they were once convicted of a felony, even if they are now out
of prison or never served time. That number is unparalleled in recent
history. For the last 25 years the number of ex-felons disenfranchised has
increased from 1% to almost 5% of Florida's voting age population. That
includes at least 139,000 African-Americans-fully 9% of Florida Blacks of
voting age.
The real crime is that the restrictions against "felons" voting include
anything from writing a bad check 30 years ago to non-violent drug
offenses. While Florida and Alabama disenfranchise the highest number of
citizens, varying amounts of such disenfranchisement takes place in every
state except Maine, Vermont and Massachusetts.
A different kind of "disenfranchising" also cost Gore thousands of votes,
far more than the amount needed to win. That was the confusing ballot that
resulted in elderly, many Jewish, citizens giving at least 3,000 votes
intended for Gore to Pat Buchanan. Their anguish was compounded because
Buchanan is known by them as an arch anti-Semite. Far from being taken
seriously, their cries were dropped and provided nothing more than jokes
for the stand-up comics about senior citizens.
RIGHT'S LONG WAR FOR WHITE HOUSE
The Republican Party's desperation to win the White House has been growing
ever since they failed in their attempt at a right-wing coup,
American-style, with the impeachment of Clinton two years ago.
Whatever their attitude to Clinton's personal behavior, the disgust of the
American people at the inquisition the far-right subjected him to was clear
in the 74% approval rating given to him as soon as he was impeached! Then,
as now, the deepest opposition came from Black America, yet what marked
that episode was that the Right's power to bring about such an impeachment
had taken the country by surprise.
In this election, the forces opposed to allowing the Christian Coalition to
get into the White House via Bush were clearly not fooled by the lavish
display of "diversity" at the Republican Convention or the "Compassionate
Conservatism" served to them during the campaign. The question that remains
is how the forces of opposition will develop a vision of a very different
future from that served up by either Democrats, Republicans, or even Nader.
It is true that many who turned out for Nader were expressing their
dissatisfaction with the "two-party system." While they were looking for an
alternative to the ever-expanding gap between rich and poor, Nader failed
to address the ever-growing gap between Black and white. In the end, because Nader's populism fell so far short of any real alternative, so many pulle
d back from voting for him that he didn't even get the 5% to qualify for
federal matching funds for the next election. He can now expect a backlash
for being charged with playing the role of "spoiler."
Many of those drawn to Nader's campaign were from the new generation of
activists born a year ago in Seattle. The coalescence of
forces-environmentalists, women, youth and labor-that made Seattle a "new
moment" raises the question of whether the coalescence of forces contesting
this election could represent a deepening of that movement. Though the
Black dimension seemed to be missing in Seattle, it has moved front and
center in these events. Black and Jewish voters have been brought together
in a way not seen since the civil rights era, as Jews and Blacks marched
together to protest the unfairness of the ballot procedures to both groups.
What speaks to the crucial nature of the Black dimension is the way the
2000 elections have brought to attention the way a candidate can win the
popular vote-as Gore did this year, by 300,000 votes-and yet lose the tally
of the Electoral College. Very few, if any, of the pundits who have been
giving us lessons about the Tilden-Hayes election of 1876 (when the
Electoral College voted for the minority candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes)
mentioned that they did so because Hayes promised to withdraw Federal
troops from the South, which had been protecting freed Black slaves and
enforcing Reconstruction after the Civil War. What none of the pundits
mention is that the year after those troops were removed from the South
they were used to crush the railroad strikes from Pennsylvania to Texas.
(See AMERICAN CIVILIZATION ON TRIAL, p. 12, for a discussion of this page
of our history.)
While none of this may seem to bear any similarity to what we face today,
it illuminates the dangers of ignoring the importance of the Black
dimension in any movement for freedom in the U.S. today.
THE REAL 'STATE OF THE UNION'
There is no question that those opposed to the status quo include not only
the thousands who came out to vote against Bush, but many of the 100
million who did not come out to vote at all, so sure were they that there
was nothing to vote for.
In one direction or the other, the electoral impasse between Gore and Bush
has brought to the surface the depth of the dissatisfaction with the whole
system. What marks the 2000 election is not the closeness of the votes for
George W. Bush and Al Gore, or even the many ways the Republican contender
managed to steal the election. What marks it is the way the lines have been
drawn for future battles by the forces of revolt, which we will soon be
seeing in more fundamental ways than in the machinations and controlled
chaos of this election.
While the spectacle has provided the comedy shows with a ready supply of
jokes, and countries from Russia to Cuba to Zimbabwe gleefully offered to
send observers to help count the votes, this election was no laughing
matter. The crises that are looming ahead forewarn of the real "state of
the union" as we confront everything from the economic insecurity
guaranteed now that the techno-bubble has already burst, to the crucial
threat to all the gains women thought they had won over 30 years ago, to
even so imminent a danger as the dire consequences of the global warming
which has already begun melting the polar ice cap. Never has the need for
an alternative to the inequities and downright corruption that has passed
for American "democracy" been more evident than in this Election 2000.
--December 4, 2000
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