From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Thu Nov 09 2006 - 16:59:50 EST
Well, clearly the American voters voted the Republicans out, rather than voting the Democrats in. It was largely a protest vote with a big swing by the moderate, liberals and independent voters towards the Democrats, including a significant portion of religious people. They simply wanted change. They no longer believed the demonising, reactionary and evil cant of the neoconservatives, waving around bogeys to scare people with. So overall really it is a victory for neo-liberalism or at least moderation. "The Republicans created their defeat by focusing obsessively on the right-wing "base," ostracizing not only the Democrats but their own party's more moderate legislators. The conflict between the extremist House and the conservative Senate created a phony center, far to the right of the general public's idea of where the middle ought to be. (...) The Democrats won a negative victory, riding on the wave of public anger about Republicans." (NYT 9 nov. 2006)http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/08/opinion/08wed5.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin Mr Bush admitted a "thumping" but was surprised at the result because, he said, when economic growth has been relatively strong, this has usually favoured the governing party. But this is a political analysis belonging to a previous generation, which less and less applies in the 21st century. One simple reason for that, apart from cultural changes, is that economic growth less and less benefits the whole population. Thus, even if economic growth is strong, large masses of people draw no particular advantage from it. Globalisation indeed begets a kind of international "ghettoisation", in which the beneficiaries of economic growth are much more concentrated in particular sectors, or particular privileged social classes. In some cases, it means that the rich literally wall themselves off from the poor. E.J. Dionne Jr. writes: "What needs to begin is a long struggle to create a new social contract that will protect and lift up the tens of millions of Americans for whom globalization is more threat than promise." http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/11/08/AR2006110802080.html The idea here is that the Democrats should, or would act to promote a national reconciliation. But the prospect of such a new social contract is not very high, because the configuration of political and class forces is very different than in Roosevelt's time, and there are many deep rifts and conflicts of interest that have developed, including within the business class. The Democrats are effectively put in a position of trying to reconcile the irreconcilable. And apart from adapting to the political centre, their political proposals are really very modest, if not altogether timid. No doubt they will supply some kind of policy package, but it won't be very radical and it is unlikely to reconcile people to any great extent or for any length of time. It is more in the nature of advertising, cosmetics and symbolisms, or a search for a current common denominator. One way of putting it is that American capitalism with its bloated state apparatus is now politically at the point which less wealthy capitalist countries reached in the 1980s. As the strong man of the world economy, America could stave off many trends which engulfed less wealthy capitalist countries; America benefited from deregulated capital markets, whereas many other countries did not. That is also a reason why Americans often cannot understand the sentiments of people in other countries whose experience is different. The "war on terror" with the ism dropped off could be over sooner than we think. I certainly hope so, because it is a nonsense. But the strange thing is that although Americans delivered a strong protest vote against the war in Iraq, the President nevertheless still insists that he will continue to pursue it to the end. So much for democracy as the "rule of the people". John McCain commented that he thought America was essentially a "conservative country". But the question is really what conservatism can nowadays achieve for the population. And if, since we cannot go back to the past, conservatism just means defending the status quo, then if the status quo buckles from the weight of social change, people are forced out of conservatism. In reality, it is a time of social and political ferment in the USA, out of which no doubt new political forces will begin to emerge in the future. Jurriaan
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