Legends of the election

...DISSENT / Spring 2001 n 31...

...Bush won 246 electoral votes...

...Lynching is as likely to be visited on gays as blacks, and abortion providers are most likely of all to be assassinated...

...As for Richard Nixon, we really did believe there was a constitutional crisis, and in fact there really was one, involving the subornation of the Justice Department—and thus the separation of powers—and the use of antidemocratic tactics to secure an election and punish dissidents...

...And yet the heart of Tammy country may be where they hate Hillary the most...

...What exactly is it, though, that they fear from me and mine, and the president we more or less supported...

...PHILIP GREEN is the author of Cracks in the Pedestal: Gender and Ideology in Hollywood and Equality and Democracy...

...and to the victor go the spoils...

...Bush can't possibly be worse, and the ruling class still rules...

...They have destroyed the deal's credibility right out in the open for everyone to see...

...He gave fiscal conservatives and the religious right the virtual end of federal debt and a balanced budget, which in the immanentism of Christian fundamentalists had always somehow been a "biblical" issue...

...In any event, when they have seized the government (and the military force that is its real base), without qualm and accompanied by a ceaseless litany of publicly expressed hatred and contempt during the seizure process (think of James Baker), I find it hard to believe that they will care what I or any others think about paying for prescription drugs or the number of African-Americans in the federal judiciary...

...The electoral vote count is also quite clear: Gore won 267 electoral votes...

...In the February 8 issue of the New York Review of Books, which arrived in mailboxes just in time for the inauguration, there was a Basic Books ad for a book called Smashmouth: Two Years in the Gutter with Al Gore and George W Bush, by Dana Milbank of the Washington Post, heralded as "The Definitive Look at All of Campaign 2000...

...yet the most worthless nonentities can raise millions of dollars simply by promising that they are going to oppose, attack, prosecute, or slander her...

...For the moment, I can work up no interest in it, and cannot do so no matter how hard I try (admittedly this may change later...

...Conversely, several potential counts, in which "all" the countable votes cast would have been counted by one standard or another, show or might have shown Al Gore to be the winner (though a complete count of the undervotes might still have favored Bush...

...The taboos change over time (for example, women now defined as victims of rape or domestic abuse were once considered fair game), but the general principle remains the same: within these limits, the patriarchal male can screw around in private all he wants...

...That should be put differently, perhaps...

...It didn't take much, and thus was not very noticeable, because aside from the protest demonstrations of African-Americans during the post-election days in Florida, the opposition, such as it was, lacked any will to resist or defy it...

...Even among white people, on the gender front at least, this was one of the most ideologically divisive elections ever...

...But if we do believe in the absolute power of a 50 percent + n majority, then that majority (of the votes cast for either Bush or Gore) was certainly on the side of Al Gore, who won the election by approximately half a million votes...

...For the rabid right, it was absolutely clear that everything—civilization itself—was at stake...

...I must confess here to a probably idiosyncratic response to this prospect...

...The only truthful thing that can be said about the Florida vote, in the end, is that by the time we have taken into account not only undervotes (fittingly, my spell-check does not accept that word, nor does it recognize "chad"), but also the misleading ballot of Palm Beach County and the racial intimidation and denial of legal voters' voting rights by the GOP machine everywhere in the state (for a full analysis, see the Nation of February 5, 2001), there is no imaginable scenario by which George W. Bush clearly won...

...Indeed, it's hard to think of any president in American history who gave his political opponents more of their expressed wish list than Bill Clinton did, or who more faithfully followed out the line that "It's the economy, stupid," and then got no credit at all...

...Thus, despite the achievements of the long feminist cultural revolution, acceptance of patriarchy and conformity to its conventions continue to be the sine qua non of success at the pinnacle of American public life...

...Unfortunately, its appeal depends on the presumption that people (other than the speaker, that is) are fools who don't know what's good for them and on a class reductionism about "who governs" that merits the qualifier "vulgar...

...As to who "they" are, if anyone who reads this might be wondering, the answer to that question was given once again by Edmond O'Brien, though in a different movie (The Wild Bunch): "They is they...

...One, the position of a small minority, is the vulgar Marxist position that it all doesn't matter: Bill Clinton was terrible for poor people, African-Americans, "the environment" (that useful abstraction), immigrants, the third world, and so on...

...The venom is understandable, in that for those who've bought into the patriarchal deal heart and soul the implications were terrifying...

...If one allows one's anger at welfare "reform," the North American Free Trade Agreement, the destruction of habeas corpus, and the other miseries of Clinton-Goreism to overwhelm all other perspectives, this can seem—briefly—like an appealing critique...

...Of course, Tammy Wynette doesn't play here: you should stand by your man, but not by the Devil himself in the disguise of a Great Leader...

...Aside from the fact that he was generally right-wing and anti-Semitic, histories of the time do not record very much about the marechars concrete views...

...In Vichy France, for example, I doubt that the left cared in the slightest about Marshal Petain's views on old-age pensions, labor unions, soil erosion in the Dordogne, the rights of Algerian immigrants, or any similar issues of "public policy" that might have existed at the time...

...The process of printing the legend about the 2000 presidential election has now been well under way for some time...

...Women can get ahead—to the Senate or the cabinet, but if they want to be Leaders they must not flaunt any doubts they might have about the patriarchal lifestyle...

...But nobody knows or ever will know who won the twenty-five electoral votes of Florida...

...As for Hillary Rodham Clinton, aside from botching a health-care "reform" that was never possible, what did she ever do...

...We can only hope that the triumph of the counterrevolutionaries will prove to be short run...

...She was arrogant and humorless, like many of the friends or colleagues of anyone reading these pages, yet to whom we remain perfectly civil (as they to us despite our faults...

...To the contrary, closeness can—and among many, many millions in this case—did result from an unwillingness or inability to compromise sharply held differences...

...Surely, the most fascinating aspect of the 2000 campaign was the exit-poll finding that roughly a quarter of both Gore and Bush voters felt "seriously threatened" by the prospect that the other guy would win...

...In general, most of the declineof-civilization rhetoric we hear nowadays is in one form or another about sex, not about race...

...What is somewhat more difficult to explain is the hatred that accompanied that lust throughout the 1990s, reaching its apogee during the impeachment process and again during that surrogate for impeachment, the appropriation of the election...

...if it's just a had mistake, what have their lives been worth...

...It is, in the person of Bill and Hillary, the ultimate betrayal of the patriarchal deal...

...She was probably a liar and occasionally corrupt, like many senators and governors and members of the House, not to mention the mayors of big cities, or small towns, or suburbs...

...That the Florida Democratic Party itself bears much responsibility for both undervoting and overvoting among its constituents does not change this fact, since the issue is not blame but a truthful account of the results...

...The deal is that Leaders will be Men, and they will Set the Moral Tone for us all, by being publicly good father/husbands and visibly strong...

...even a weak man...

...As to who actually "won" Florida's popular and thus electoral vote (the inverted commas should properly delight the heart of every postmodernist), we can say only that one potential vote count showed Bush to be the winner, but this count was incomplete, and was deliberately cut short by various Bush supporters who had the power—though not the legitimate authority—to do so...

...But why...

...As a veteran of the Vietnam antiwar movement and an avid follower of the postWatergate impeachment, I find it especially hard to understand...

...What's crucial to the survival of the deal is its credibility...

...I also find it hard to believe that a party that supinely allowed the election to be taken from it by snarling force will stand up to its usurpers...

...As a single woman of my acquaintance put it quite simply (and angrily), "If you've ever been poor you know that anyone who thinks there's no difference between them is crazy...

...THERE ARE various possible left responses to the sequence of events that installed George W. Bush as the American president...

...Like a Conquered Province The evidence is actually pretty clear about whom we did "choose...

...But context is everything: 2000 is not 1876 or 1960, and when the president-installed's brother and his faithful servant orchestrate their own campaign of racial exclusion to help decide an election, and a major party suborns the highest court in the land, that is substantially different...

...Let us remember that in 1992 the now secretary of state, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—a black man who could probably be elected president himself—disobeyed the first direct order given him by his new commander in chief and torpedoed the abolition of discrimination against gays in the military...

...For many whites, a good black man is one who knows and loves patriarchy when he sees it...

...The de-election of Gore is its final, necessary, triumph...

...that the appropriation of the presidency aside, they are pushing against the tide...

...Even affirmative action, when it has to do with women in the military, causes as much gnashing of teeth as it does when it is about blacks in higher education...

...Among Democrats, only the Congressional 30 n DISSENT / Spring 2001 PLAN B Black Caucus members, turning their backs and walking out of the seat of government after the recording of the Florida electoral "vote"—an action every Democrat should have emulated—reminded us that a truly shattering political event had just had its denouement...

...In Hegel's phrase, they provide Rectitude...

...The Onion's parody is no parody after all...

...Clinton's fate, and ultimately that of his anointed successor, was set right then and there...

...The patriarchal deal is very simple, but hard to sustain: against nature, one might say...

...and Hillary Rodham Clinton has set all-time, all-everywhere records for standing by her man...

...Therefore, a man who can't keep them under control could not possibly be a strong or good Leader...

...Clinton the failure would have been an enduring message of hope for the righteous...

...the legend of the CNN/MSNBC pundits that the closeness of the election was due to a lack of issues dividing the electorate...

...Thus to say, for example, as the punDISSENT / Spring 2001 n 27 PLAN B dits (an arcane synonym for "purveyors of disinformation") were so relentlessly and cheerfully saying throughout the post-Election Day period, that there were "no tanks in the streets," is again to print the legend not the fact...

...But a lot of people can get hurt in a short run...

...Everything collapses...

...What is the immensity of this rage about...

...Thus, the last legend is the most foolish one...

...Impeachment was the first, but failed, step toward restoring the natural order...

...The favorite epithet for Bill Clinton among Washington insiders was "pussy-whipped...

...He was a hedgehog, not a fox...

...He had only one idea, but it was a big one—that he should rule on behalf of Reaction...

...Despite that fact, "welfare" has always been a racialized issue, standing in—along with "school busing"—for opposition to real social integration long after formal segregation was legally abolished...

...there will be more to come...

...And in even the closest of the states for which those votes were tallied, the popular vote count withstood challenge and was accepted as accurate (or accurate enough) by everyone...

...When he was gone, and we could feel that "order" had been restored, we returned to the normal range of emotions...

...what counterproposals must be made, and so on, and so on...

...The popular vote was close, so close that in any case it verges on exaggeration to say that anyone chose anybody...

...That is to say, as well as winning the popular vote, Al Gore was a clear winner of the elec26 n DISSENT / Spring 2001 PLAN B toral vote, so far as that vote is available to us...

...Forget prosperity: keep in mind what's really important...

...Instead, they are equally, but separately, feminine...

...it might be useful to remind ourselves of some soon-to-be-forgotten facts...

...I DON'T THINK what's going on is at all obscure...

...Women can neither Set the Moral Tone nor provide Rectitude, because in DISSENT / Spring 2001 n 29 PLAN B a rightful order they are neither strong nor the heads of families...

...The most appropriate resolution of the dilemma posed by this truth would have been (what is not constitutionally admissible) to have split its electoral votes—or counted them twice, twenty-five for each candidate, which might have been more constitutionally acceptable . Either way, "we" "chose" Al Gore to be president...

...And if we despised Nixon (a more accurate word than "hated"), our negative feelings were minor league compared to the at-times psychopathic hatred he felt toward his "enemies...

...Even going back to the FDR-hating days, there has not been anything like it in my lifetime...

...The contrast with Clinton and his enemies is incredible...

...This is the reason that, once it becomes easy and widespread, abortion is so horrific to patriarchalists...

...Toni Morrison famously said that Bill Clinton was the first black president, and that is true in the sense she meant it, but it does not provide our explanation...

...They provide an example of fidelity and respectability, and in so doing they carry on the family upon which "civilization" is based...

...they are not manly...

...Anyone who doesn't know wasn't paying attention...

...Clinton the success heralds the coming of the Antichrist...

...together, we can put the triumphs of the recent past behind us...

...Here was a president, fully supported by his vice president, who achieved what not just the right, but a substantial majority of white Americans generally seemed to want: the abolition of welfare...

...that is, after all, the constitutionally mandated way of choosing a president...

...the deal is dead or dying...

...To many millions of Americans, this was the real and unbearable meaning of the original Clinton slogan that we were getting two presidents for the price of one—the health care fiasco being a visible token of the threat...

...The deal being what it is, its credibility being already so thin, there is of necessity a much higher proportion of staunch patriarchalists in the seats of government than among the population at large...

...It is true but irrelevant that white people themselves were a majority of those on welfare...

...Indeed, the pattern of public violation (which means, simply, getting caught) followed by spousal forgiveness was evident even before the 1992 election...

...A woman, however, cannot, because at the root of the patriarchal double standard, in the lingo of the anthropologists, is the fact that we can't ever really know who the father is, but we can (and damn well better) know who the mother is...

...it enables women to screw around without fear of being caught out...

...But many of us were embarrassed, or worse, by Weatherman rhetoric or the (mostly) youthful chants of "Hey, hey, L. B. J., how many kids did you kill today...

...the Horror, the Horror...

...His only idea is that he should govern on behalf of his social class...

...To say, however, that Bill and Hillary have flaunted doubts about the patriarchal lifestyle is to laughably understate the case...

...nowadays you can find plenty of Old New Leftists who look on Nixon's presidency almost with nostalgia...

...in a word, manly...

...It's Sex, Stupid" The lust for power needs no explanation...

...In the words of the Onion's parody of a George W. Bush address to the nation, "Our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over...

...The United States survived the deal that ended Reconstruction in 1876 (but ex-slaves didn't really survive it), and with dead people voting early and often, vote totals have been corrupted before (though not such as to actually decide the outcome of a national election, even in 1960...

...What attitude should the inhabitants of a conquered province have toward their conquerors...

...We must be able to go on believing in it, despite our private (or merely academic) knowledge of its absurdity...

...the Court suborned itself...

...Our feeling was mostly one of excitement and passion, in the face of an actual conflict in which millions of real people were being slaughtered, fueled by an inflated sense of our own historical importance ("The Times They Are A-Changin," subject of many a political science final exam in those days...

...The natural order was being trashed...

...Equivalent epithets for Hillary were not lacking...

...as I write these words, shortly after Bush has promised "reconsideration" of RU-486, we're reminded every day of what we feared: that thou28 n DISSENT / Spring 2001 PLAN B sands or millions of real people may be seriously hurt by the policies and appointments of the compassionate conservative...

...All in all, an unexceptionally imperfect woman...

...Even a woman who doesn't believe in patriarchy (as Margaret Thatcher ostensibly did) and in the rightful rule of the dark suit, red tie brigade can become a Leader...

...even, God help us, a gay man, might make a great president...

...George W. Bush, the "compassionate conservative" who has never to anyone's knowledge indulged in a single moment of actual compassion, is the same...

...and Richard Nixon, or at least we thought we did...

...It could not be borne, cannot be borne, that history might think of this, this sinful man, this un-man as, if not a Great Leader, at least a good and successful one...

...As one of the former who certainly would have ticked that box, I know why "we" felt threatened...

...If Bill Clinton could be thought of as a Great Leader, then the patriarchal deal isn't necessary: any man, even a man who is "out of (patriarchal) control...

...It calls the sanctity of motherhood, even the very nature of motherhood, into question...

...Though in some cases they intertwine race and sex, the latter is almost always at their root...

...But of course this is exactly what did not happen, so that before we can even begin to "go back" we already have to endorse one of the first great lies of this century...

...On the other hand, perhaps the author of the ad meant that the Electoral College "chose" our next leader...

...The first paragraph of the ad's text, from one of commercial publishing's supposedly serious players, informed us that "Now that we've finally chosen our next leader, it's time to go back and figure out what happened...

...That is why, sadly, Gore's supporters, always on the defensive, were unable to work up the passion, the inspiring hatred, that we saw on the faces of the Bush demonstrators, heard in the voices of their spokespersons and pundits...

...Of course it's not the economy, it's sex, stupid...

...We" (or many of us) in some sense "hated" L.B.J...

...Not just men but women have built their entire lives and systems of values around that deal, and that lifestyle...

...The tank is just technology, a symbol of armed force—and armed force, from the state and local police, to the GOP's thugs, to the governor and state legislature who are the authoritative repository of all such force within a state—is exactly what decided the outcome...

...A man in a leadership position must follow this program faithfully, and not violate taboos that are themselves part of the deal that patriarchy offers women...

...What is going on here...

...For if one thing is absolutely clear, it's that "we" did not "choose" our next leader, he was chosen for us, by various people who were in no way part of the constituted democratic process for choosing him...

...Perhaps, as a professional democratic theorist (already probably a contradiction in terms), I take all of this too seriously...

...More common is the approach that stalwarts of the left such as Dissent, the Nation, the Institute for Policy Studies, and others, are taking: inundating us with what promises to be three and a half years of position papers (one hopes not longer than that) on what is to be done, or fought for, or resisted...

...Stand by your man," Tammy Wynette said...

...Divorce, unwed teenage mothers, promiscuity, the "degeneration" of popular culture, and above all abortion: these are the hot-button issues on the right...

...Only the Electoral College didn't "choose" Bush either...

...On any other subject—education, race—he's about as sincere and persuasive as a wet dishrag, but on that one his behavior and his bearing speak volumes...

...Nowadays, except on the neo-Nazi and skinhead right, though race still provides plentiful fodder for contempt (as in the wars on drugs, crime, and welfare, not to mention the respectful attention that still gets paid to the pseudo-science of "IQ"), it does not generate the plain hatred that it used to...