Black World
January-February 2000

Campaign 2000-6 degrees of danger

by Lou Turner

The U.S. media tell us, despite their interminable coverage, that the American public has not yet waked up to this year's presidential primary races. This is the first degree of danger we face in arguably one of the most scary political years of the last century. The danger lies in the media's attempt to convince us that there's nothing to stay awake for, so accustomed have they become to the stench of neofascism in the air. While the corporate media help the current crop of far Right Republican candidates create a political smokescreen with such seemingly innocuous issues as tax cuts, campaign financing, health care, and Social Security, a neofascist politics has been articulated with impunity around such social issues as women's reproductive freedom, lesbian and gay rights, militarism, affirmative action, and criminal justice policy.

Christian fundamentalist Gary Bauer of the reactionary Family Research Council has led the way, with the rest of the Republican field in tow, in making his rabid anti-abortion position the litmus test for choosing a vice-presidential running mate and nominees to the Supreme Court. With Bauer, the other panderer for the overly inflated Christian Right vote, Alan Keyes (who hates being referred to as a "Black" candidate), has articulated the most neofascistic position, calling for the abolition of all human rights protections for lesbians and gays.

Arizona Senator John McCain epitomizes the so-called "character issue" and the "politics of biography" that the media christened in the aftermath of Bill Clinton's impeachment scandal. At every opportunity McCain trades on his experience as a Vietnam War era prisoner of war to further the historical revisionism concerning the U.S. imperialist war in Vietnam that Republicans and Democrats foster to pursue their doctrine of permanent war. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party campaigns of Vice-President Al Gore and former New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley have taken the art of taking the Black vote for granted to a whole new height. Bradley's sports celebrity status, as a former forward for the New York Knicks, is the substance of his politics of personal biography and has garnered him a "dream team" of Black sports celebrities-Old School. Gore has matched Bradley with an all-star cast of Black celebrity support that includes Bill Cosby, Aretha Franklin, Coretta Scott King, Shaquille O'Neal, and Carl Lewis.

There was a curious moment in the politics of Black celebrity recently when Gore's campaign manager (a Black woman) told a reporter that the Gen. Colin Powell and the right-wing Congressman from Oklahoma, J.C. Watts, were nothing more than tokens that the Republican Party exploits to try convince Black Americans they are taken seriously.

More revealing still was the one discordant note in the reactionary chorus of Republican candidates sounded by McCain's so-called "anti-candidate" opposition to the current corrupt state of campaign financing by special interests. Suddenly, the whole money trail of right-wing funding for everything, from the National Right to Life Committee to the Christian Coalition to pork-barrel spending to foreign contributions, was exposed. Through its access to wealthy right-wing contributors the political and religious Right has exerted its hegemonic hold on "American civilization."

Republican power brokers are actually on point when they attack McCain for being unstable and a loose cannon. He is! Indeed, one has to wonder if McCain himself wasn't the one who, in an effort to put the genie back in the bottle, leaked information that he had intervened in a government regulatory agency on behalf of one of his large corporate contributors. What the Republican campaign reveals is the ongoing right-wing attempt to drive American society further towards neofascism.

To make the fetishism of politics and money complete there is nothing to add save religion. The politics of religion have given a certain halo to the politics of personal biography. What the delusional, professional capitalist Steve Forbes lacks in personal biography he thinks can be made up with his personal fortune and the most reactionary pandering to the Christian Right.

Confessions of born-again Christian faith defy even being put into words. When asked to account for his new found faith, Texas Governor George W. (pronounced: Dubya) Bush confessed, "If they don't know, it's going to be hard to explain." Politics have been supplanted by religion, which, as Tocqueville observed, is "believed in without discussion."

W.'s campaign, the richest in the history of the nation, personifies just this kind of politics for the Republican faithful. His oxymoronic "compassionate conservatism" is a case of what Marx called RELIGION AS SUCH: the fetish of secular faith is believed in without discussion. According to such politics of immediate faith, it could be claimed that racism and poverty are no longer of any great significance, due supposedly to the "booming" economy. As an article of faith of the religion of "compassionate conservatism," the American people are then expected to believe in this catechism without discussion (shades of Ronald Reagan). And, naturally, the clueless amen corner called the media can be depended upon to do just that.

BUSH IS THE ONLY CANDIDATE IN POWER WHO HAS CARRIED OUT THE AUTHORITARIAN SOCIAL POLICIES THAT HIS SCARY WANNABE FELLOW TRAVELERS FROTH AT THE MOUTH ABOUT CARRYING OUT. AS GOVERNOR, GEORGE W. BUSH PRESIDES OVER A STATE THAT LEADS THE COUNTRY, IF NOT THE WORLD, IN EXECUTIONS (115 DURING HIS TENURE) AND BOASTS THE COUNTRY'S LARGEST PRISON-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX AND MOST RUTHLESS WELFARE POLICY.

On the far side of the political lunar-scape is Ross Perot's Reform Party that has become a snake oil road show featuring sideshow performers like billionaire eccentric Donald Trump, ex-wrestler and current Minnesota Governor Jesse "The Body" Ventura, and in a class all alone, the political marriage between the neofascist Nixon speech writer Pat Buchanan and the Lyndon LaRouchite Black politico Lenora Fulani. The strange pseudo-left psychopolitics of Fulani's New Alliance Party are no stranger to red-brown alliances. Fulani was a staunch supporter of Louis Farrakhan in the period of his most rabid anti-Semitic demagoguery.

One warning of the dangers of this year's retrogressive political climate was actually evident in the past year's most radical moment-the Seattle WTO demonstrations. The emerging anti-globalization politics that were so full-blown in Seattle also form the ideological ground of the Buchanan-Fulani alliance. And others on the Left, such as followers of Ralph Nader, environmentalists, and trade unionists have been attracted to Buchanan's false populist attack on big-business, big-government, and big two-party politics.

The emerging anti-globalization left politics after Seattle are only one of the forces of revolt who face this danger. That is all the more reason why it's high time that we woke up to the neofascist dangers that lie ahead in this election year.