Post-Impeachment Blues
Isaac, Jeffrey C.
FOR ANYONE who cares about democratic values, the most significant thing about the impeachment debacle was the vapidity of the surrounding debate—its failure to raise serious questions about the...
...But the simple, arithmetical fact is that Tom DeLay and his compatriots did not simply vote their conscience on impeachment...
...They also voted on behalf of their hard-core constituency, namely, the Christian Right, which controls a substantial number of state Republican Party organizations and which also dominates the primary process in so many states...
...Indeed, beneath the inflated constitutional rhetoric and salacious media attention, the proceedings reveal some troubling features of the operation of power in American politics today...
...Certainly it is not clear that it backs a revitalized democratic left...
...This, and not the question of Clinton's vindication, is its true significance...
...Indeed, this points to a crucial fact—that ideological debate and political conflict are still largely structured around legacies of the sixties and around a "culture war" that the conservative right seems to refuse to abandon...
...How else to explain how Bill Clinton, the most Republican of postwar Democratic presidents—he has presided over the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the end of "welfare as we know it"—is hated and challenged by conservatives amid "prosperity...
...One is the Southernization/Dixiecratization of the Republican Party, and the development of a strong mobilization of bias against Clinton and what he is held to represent— Ivy League savvy, feminism, the blues, "relativism," the sixties—that long preceded Lewinsky or even Whitewater...
...It might be argued that there is solace in the fact that public opinion was so clearly at odds with this right-wing culDISSENT / Spring 1999 n 13 THOUGHTS AFTER IMPEACHMENT tural agenda...
...Indeed, they wield this power in ways that often defy the conventional logic of class politics...
...WHIGH BRINGS me to my final point...
...today they are "statesmen" (the irony of having Strom Thurmond administer the oath to William Rehnquist was lost on most commentators...
...Second, there is the very credulity with which most Americans seem to treat "the Clinton prosperity...
...An impeachment process that eight months ago was considered ill-fated and likely to fade away in fact moved all the way to the Senate, where such august "leaders" as Orrin Hatch seconded the most outrageous charges of their supposedly more "radical" House colleagues...
...Gingrich in 2004...
...A case could be made that this pro-growth constituency is fairly shallow and in any case it is unorganized...
...Public opinion" may not be with Falwell, but it is not clear that it is with anything...
...The Republican right managed to generate an incredible momentum behind a process with little popular support, and they were able to do this because they have a great deal of political power...
...The problem with this argument is twofold...
...It is thus hard to think about the impeachment events without being somewhat depressed...
...What people really care about, insist E.J...
...Might this not suggest a basis for a revitalized left liberalism...
...Stranger things have happened...
...Perhaps there is consolation in Newt Gingrich's departing in disgrace...
...First, it is not clear how deep support for Clinton really is...
...Right wingers may not have the general polling numbers, but they make up for this in organizational infrastructure and in the intensity of their beliefs...
...Isn't it ironic to see Democrats preaching about "business confidence," while Republicans prattle on about "civic virtue...
...And the cover of his recent book presents him looking rather fit, and happy, as if harboring some special information unavailable to his detractors...
...JEFFREY C. ISAAC teaches political science at Indiana University and is the author of Democracy in Dark Times...
...Remember the Vince Foster rumors, spread with malignity by Jerry Falwell...
...FOR ANYONE who cares about democratic values, the most significant thing about the impeachment debacle was the vapidity of the surrounding debate—its failure to raise serious questions about the structure or future of American democracy...
...The people who run Congress were considered "extremists" twenty years ago...
...That's why they like Clinton, and why they yearn for a new progressive agenda...
...It is hard to see how such a public is readily amenable to a serious left agenda...
...Dionne and many other progressives, are "middle-class dreams" or prosperity and Social Security...
...Now, the conscience can be a fairly unreliable arbiter of ethical sensitivity, and there is no reason to doubt that assassins of obstetrician-gynecologists or Serbian ethnic "cleansers" also act on their "conscience...
...The likes of Bob Barr have been calling for Clinton's impeachment from day one, and certainly ever since his early position on gays in the military...
...This suggests that citizens are disinclined to ask deeper questions about globalization, financial instability, poverty, or economic insecurity...
...Pundits are fond of pointing out that this antipathy toward Clinton is not borne out by polling data, and have thus concluded that many conservative Republicans must be "voting their consciences...
...But his successors in the House seem worse...
...The Republicans establishment that continues to enjoy a political mobilization of bias has succeeded in sustaining cultural polarization— rather than class polarization—in American politics...
Vol. 46 • April 1999 • No. 2
