Civic disrespect
Galbraith, James K.
WITH THE EVENTS Of late in the year 2000, the United States left behind the era of constitutional republicanism and turned to a different form of government. It is not, however, a new form. It...
...In short, Gore's campaign proved that there is a majority in the United States for a government that is not, as Clinton's was, an assemDISSENT / Spring 2001 n 25 PLAN B blage of lawyers, professors, and investment bankers nor as Bush's is, a mixture of politicians, soldiers, and corporate chieftains...
...One strand began with the assault on Bill Clinton, the elevation of his personal flaws to an affair of state, his impeachment, and so the neutralization of Clinton as a political force...
...Bush was surrounded from the beginning by adept handlers, and by seasoned elders to whom he defers...
...The Supreme Court clarified this in a way that the Florida courts could not have...
...Threequarters of the Reform vote went back to the Republicans...
...This was deliberate, cold-blooded, purposeful...
...It certainly affected him in Arkansas, one state where Clinton's active help might have decided the election...
...But Gore won Florida, too...
...But the post-election crisis was only the capstone of the story...
...The tragedy of New Hampshire, of course, was that those five thousand votes, and the four electors they delivered, would have made Florida irrelevant...
...In social terms, civic disrespect means that the illegitimacy of this administration must not be allowed to fade from view...
...WITH THOSE steps taken, Democrats must also recognize and adapt to the new political landscape that emerged from this election...
...When Bush did win, by a single Supreme Court vote, Gore's concession speech was justly praised for grace and humor...
...In 2000, with $12.4 million of federal monies to spend, Reform dissolved and disappeared...
...Or to be precise, the distinction drawn by Gore himself became holy writ: one might disagree with the Court, but not with the legitimacy of its decision...
...Thus the larger political task...
...But I will not reconcile myself to them...
...Once they are, and the Greens return to the Democratic Party, Oregon, Washington, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa should return firmly to the Democratic fold...
...He had a brand name, one hundred unanswerable millions of dollars to spend, and no liabilities that could not be kept mostly hidden through one election...
...The shareholders, owners in title only, are invited to cast their votes in periodic referenda...
...Pat Buchanan killed it...
...Then they arranged to obstruct the count of the vote...
...Was this coincidenDISSENT / Spring 2001 n 23 PLAN B tal...
...Press references from that moment forward were to President-elect Bush, an unofficial title and something that the governor from Texas (president-select...
...It thus preserved Gore for another political day...
...The conventions of politics remain: Bush is president...
...For the Supreme Court especially, vacancies need not be filled...
...No overt evidence suggests otherwise, but political motivations are not unheard-of at the Federal Reserve, and history will judge...
...The distinction is not one of regional origin, but of coalition...
...president-designate...
...But their franchise is only symbolic, for management holds a majority of the proxies...
...The fourth element was Ralph Nader...
...But they first stoked and then destroyed the technology boom, and by fall, they were causing a serious economic slowdown...
...Future Republicans will almost surely also be "southern," for that is where the base of the party now lies...
...The first step toward that goal lies in defining clearly the difference between their political ethics and our own...
...And Nader's view that there was no significant difference between Gore and Bush was quickly proved false by Bush's cabinet appointments...
...These were, perhaps, sensible legal lines...
...But the theft of Florida, ultimately delivered by the Supreme Court, represented a step beyond...
...Only New Hampshire, where Gore lost by five thousand votes and Nader got twentytwo thousand, was tipped by Nader alone...
...The Nader voters were motivated passionately by such issues as the drug war, the death penalty, consumer protection, and national missile defense—issues where New Democrats took Republican positions in their effort to woo the South...
...The manipulation of this election extended far back in time, and it is worth reviewing briefly some of its many dimensions...
...What can prevent such a thing...
...And the shameless attitude of the Bush high command merely illustrates, in unusually visible fashion, the prevalent ethical system of corporate life...
...Congress must work with him...
...Thug politics has to be defeated, bloc by bloc, beginning with the judiciary branch...
...With optical scanners, the chad issues disappear...
...In practical political terms, civic disrespect means drawing lines around the freedom of maneuver of the incoming administration...
...But since the election clearly revealed that the South is unattainable, these positions have no remaining political value and can now be dropped...
...Donald Rumsfeld and the new Pentagon are radical disbelievers in treaties and the international rule of law, and it is treaty law, rather than incoming missiles, that are the true targets of NMD...
...meanwhile, Perot endorsed Bush...
...On no important issue do the CEO and the board permit themselves to lose...
...If and when the United States returns to constitutional republicanism, something more than the normal restoration of the professional political class will be in order...
...While Clinton ended his term with the loyal support of African-American voters, he started in 1992 by running away from that constituency, and even more so from labor...
...JAMES K. GALBRAITH is the author of Created Unequal: The Crisis in American Pay and co-editor of Inequality and Industrial Change: A Global View...
...That may mean most of them, but no matter...
...Outside of Florida, Democratic presidential candidates are finished in the South, but they have excellent prospects of consolidating a narrow majority of the electoral college—so long as, in the next election, there is no Nader defection...
...They don't deserve to be there, and that changes everything...
...Third, Democrats should furiously oppose long-term tax measures, and particularly the elimination of the estate tax, which is a social incentive for recycling wealth to the nonprofit sector that has had a powerful effect on the 24 n DISSENT / Spring 2001 PLAN B form of American society...
...ALMOST IMMEDIATELY, of course, forgetting became the media order of the day...
...Problems, if any, may be left for the next administration...
...They lost the election...
...Like many Americans, I have nothing personal against Bush, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell—or, apart from John Ashcroft—the others who surfaced as members of the new administration...
...It paid due deference to the triumph of corporate political ethics, but did not embrace them...
...So far as the press was concerned, it became almost un-American not to accept the diktat of the Supreme Court...
...The people voted for the candidate who vowed not to tamper with those programs...
...Gore ran against, and defeated so far as ballots were concerned, a wholly southern Republican...
...Ross Perot's rebellion was the key to Clinton's election in 1992, and the Reform Party greatly boosted his margin of reelection...
...For him, there was only one objective: to win...
...Nader's disaffection with the Democrats—on issues from consumer protection, to the media, to the drug war, to the death penalty—was genuine...
...In contrast, Gore campaigned firmly with and for the Democratic base—which rewarded him with a high turnout and a huge proportion of support...
...The key to dealing with the Bush people, however, is precisely not to accept them...
...Many Democrats are at the moment bitter toward the Greens—understandably...
...But they also comported with a larger principle—that votes should be counted and the system treated with respect...
...Gore drew lines: at any attack on the legitimacy of the Electoral College, at the attack on military ballots, at direct participation in the Seminole and Martin County lawsuits, at the demands for relief over the butterfly ballots in Palm Beach...
...Al Gore won the election...
...And future Democrats, if they are northern candidates, too, can beat them...
...Rather, Americans are willing to elect a government that firmly includes and effectively represents labor, minorities, and greens...
...Only a move away from the main Clinton compromises that so infuriated the progressive left...
...The media have accepted it, for it is the form of government to which they are already professionally accustomed...
...His judgment, particularly late in the campaign when he went to the swing states, was plainly disastrous...
...Fifth, Democrats should propose, and Congress should enact, a new voting rights act, targeted precisely at the Florida abuses...
...The second strand was the invention of George W. Bush...
...Only (and immediately) after the election did the Fed begin to move to bring interest rates back down...
...And so it was the theft of Florida that will mark this election in history...
...These were left over from the Clinton consensus...
...Democrats should be more willing to compromise with Bush on the rate structure of the income tax—something that can always be changed back—than on the estate tax, which, once repealed, will never be re-enacted...
...Gore's only weaknesses among northern constituencies lay with those alienated by his few southern positions, notably on the death penalty and drugs...
...It is a system whereby a board of directors—read Supreme Court—selects the chief executive officer...
...The theft of Florida was something the Republicans did alone...
...A shorter version of this essay appeared in the Texas Observer of January 19, 2001...
...The fifty Senate Democrats should freely block judicial nominations whenever they carry even the slightest ideological taint...
...Fourth, the people must unite to oppose the global dangers of national missile defense (NMD)—a strategic nightmare on which Bush campaigned that threatens for all time the security of us all...
...A professional front man, Bush's major credential lies in his willingness to recite, again and again, precisely those lines placed in front of him and no others...
...Was this an accident of fate...
...But those of us outside that process are not bound by those conventions, and to the extent that we have a voice, we should use it...
...This is the government we must seek to elect...
...But the fact remains that Nader cost Al Gore the election only in a very narrow sense...
...These elements of manipulation—personal destruction, fronts, third parties, and interestrate manipulations, not to mention the normal mendacity on the issues—are all well within the modern American political tradition, as practiced by both parties...
...Second, the Democrats should advise Bush not to introduce any legislation on Social Security or Medicare...
...It is, rather, a transplant, highly familiar from a different arena of advanced capitalism...
...It follows that a Gore administration would have had to give significant responsibilities to authentic representatives of labor and civil rights constituencies in a way that Clinton, with Ron Brown but not Lani Guinier, never did...
...Clinton succeeded at this—but against Republicans who were only weakly "southern" at best...
...This should stipulate mandatory adoption of bestpractice technology in all federal elections, a twenty-four-hour voting day, a ban on private contractors to aid in purging voter rolls, and mandatory, immediate hand counts of all undervotes in federal elections...
...In many areas, including foreign policy, there will be few major changes...
...Gore, on the other hand, was principally a northern candidate, as the results showed...
...in others, such as annual budgets and appropriations, compromises will have to be reached...
...manifestly was not...
...A fifth element, I believe, was the disruption of the economy effected by a coalition of Reagan holdovers, bankers, and their associates on the Federal Reserve Board from 1999 through May 2000...
...And for that, the essential first task is to assure that the information ministries of our new corporate republic do not successfully cast a fog of forgetting over the crime that we have just witnessed, with our own eyes...
...The CEO in turn appoints new members of the board...
...First, this president should not be permitted to make lifetime appointments unless by consensus and on purely nonpolitical lines...
...But Bush should be opposed, as a matter of principle, on actions with a reach that will extend beyond his actual term...
...It was Clinton, after all, who elevated the modern arts of fundraising and issue triangulation among the Democrats, a theft of intellectual property that the Republicans never forgave...
...Bush drew no lines of principle...
...It would be very useful to make such a bill a Democratic leadership priority and to press it as a complement to the McCain-Feingold emphasis on campaign finance reform...
...This is corporate democracy...
...The third strand lay in the rearrangement of the political scenery after 1996...
...26 n DISSENT / Spring 2001...
...The Court can be rebuilt later, when properly elected government returns...
...Rightly or wrongly as a political matter, Al Gore accepted it...
...Rising interest rates in this period served no anti-inflation function: there was no inflation to fight...
...Gore beat Bush in almost every state that Nader might have tipped: Oregon, Washington, Michigan, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin...
...But Gore also sent an unmistakable message to American Democrats: do not forget...
...They have earned our civic disrespect, and that is what we, the people, should accord them...
Vol. 48 • April 2001 • No. 2
