The U.S. elections are now over and President Bush
has been re-elected with a decisive electoral majority and the
Republican Party has increased its seats both in the Senate and
the House of Representatives. Democrats are in a state of shock
and much of the outside world is surprised by the results. Many
had thought that the Bush administration would sink under the weight
of disastrous policies abroad and at home, especially a foreign
policy mired in the quagmire of Iraq and misguided unilateralism
and an economy skidding from anemic job growth and exploding budget
deficits and national debt. Instead, President Bush sailed to what
by American standards was an impressive victory (51 percent of
the popular vote). How does one explain this? As an African watching the elections with its
intransigent electoral patterns among the "red" and "blue" states,
voting irregularities, and gerrymandering (the drawing of voting
districts by the majority political party rather than by a nonpartisan
body) I could not but be amused wondering what American commentators
would say if this were an African election: I bet they would bemoan
the regionalization of voting as a reflection of Africans incapacity
to transcend primordial loyalties based on "tribalism" and "regionalism," voting
misdeeds would be ascribed to the propensity of African governments
for vote rigging and the ignorance of "illiterate" voters
unaccustomed to democracy. The U.S. elections clearly show that
the notion of "mature" democracies is a myth; democracy
is still a work in progress around the world.
The
popular mandate of the Bush administration is often attributed
to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which galvanized
the nation behind its lackluster president, and many have argued
that in this election the nation was simply unwilling to change
leaders in the midst of a war. The impact of the September 11 on
the American national psyche is indeed critical to understanding
current American politics, but it does not adequately explain the
right-wing drift in American political culture, which has scaled
to new heights and dates back, in its current phase, at least three
decades.
It seems to me that this drift, what I would call the republicanization
of America, can be attributed to the complex and combustible politics
of race, empire, and globalization. The triumph of the Republicans
rests on their ability to manipulate the strains and stresses of
civil rights struggles and the uncertainties about America's place
in a rapidly changing world. In short, the republicanization of
America is rooted in efforts by conservative forces to roll back
civil rights at home and project untrammeled imperial power abroad.
Many commentators note that the Republicans
have succeeded in monopolizing and manipulating the discourse
on cultural and moral "values." The
issues concerning Iraq and the economy featured high in the election,
indeed energized supporters of Senator John Kerry, the Democratic
challenger, but they were trumped by the question of "values" which
mobilized an even larger number of supporters of the Republican
Party. An administration that had started as a fluke in 2000 from
the hanging chads of Florida, and was propelled into office thanks
to a controversial Supreme Court decision, received an extraordinary
mandate in 2004.
However, the racial dynamics of the discourse
on "values" are
often left unstated. Race is the bedrock of American society that
frames and explains a lot of the country's political, cultural,
social, class, ideological, and intellectual dynamics. The cultural
values trumpeted by the Republicans and which find so much resonance
among millions of Americans primarily tap into the racial codes
of American life and are driven by the desire to unravel the civil
rights settlement of the 1960s that sought to enfranchise and empower
African Americans and other racial minorities.
The enactment of civil rights laws by President Johnson's Democratic
administration led to a crucial realignment in American politics
as Republicans adopted a
strategy to capture supporters and states, especially in the South, alarmed
by the dismantling of legal segregation. Many whites in the Southern states
bolted from the Democratic Party to the Republican Party, which articulated
its racist politics and policies in a variety of coded messages against "quotas," "reverse
discrimination," and "welfare" and for "law and order" and "traditional
American values."
The civil rights movement led by African Americans
spawned other movements including the feminist movement and,
more recently, the
gay rights movement. These movements not only drew on the struggles
and symbols of the civil rights movement, they also inherited and
incurred the opprobrium and opposition of conservative forces and
their respective signature issues – abortion and gay marriage – joined
the litany of infamy allegedly undermining American values.
Collectively these movements reinforced each
other and became central to the progressive agenda in American
politics, and as
such the target of radical conservatives who used every arsenal
at their disposal from radio to religion, from broadcasting station
to pulpit, to wage "cultural war." The politics of race
ensured unity on the Republican side in this "war" (the
party remains predominantly white and in the recent election attracted
no more than 10 percent of the black vote), and dissension on the
Democratic side as different identity and social projects competed
for primacy (as can be seen in the heated debates about gay rights
in the African American civil rights community).
Ethno-racial polarizations have bedeviled progressive politics
in the United States for a long time and partly explain why leftist
parties on the European
model have never had much traction. Race and racism tend to override class
interests and solidarity and facilitate the framing of the national dialogue
in cultural terms especially as "culture talk" increasingly became
a substitute for "race talk." This might illuminate the apparently
strange spectacle of poor and working class whites (many prefer to call themselves
middle class – a much beloved term in American popular discourse that serves
to mystify class identities) in the so-called American heartland of small towns
and rural areas voting with their cultural hearts for the republican capitalists
rather than with their economic heads against them.
The politics of race is further fueled by the
country's changing demographic composition as the share of the
white population decreases
and that of minorities increases. Some welcome the prospect of
a more multicultural and multiracial America, while others fear
this will lead to "national degeneration." In a recent
book, the influential policy wonk Samuel Huntington (he of the "clash
of civilizations" notoriety) is contemptuous of multiculturalism
and alarmed about the recent waves of immigration and the failure
of Hispanics (a rather amorphous minority) to integrate into America's
supposedly Anglo-Protestant culture (where are the African Americans?)
and forecasts the emergence of a movement of white nativism.
Such a movement already exists – it is called racism and white
supremacy – and it has many institutional and political homes.
To be sure, race has been appropriated by the different political
parties at different times. African Americans identified with the
Republicans (the party of Abraham Lincoln) even if most of them
could not vote until the era of President Roosevelt's New Deal
when they began to gravitate to the Democrats, an affiliation consolidated
during the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Since then the Republican
Party has been concentrating its appeal to whites notwithstanding
periodic gestures to minorities in hotly contested districts. For
its part, the Democratic Party is increasingly becoming the party
of minorities.
The Republicans are better placed than the Democrats to promote
both the project of white supremacy at home and imperial supremacy
abroad. During the Cold War the Republicans portrayed themselves
as the robust guardians of national security and the fact that
the former Soviet Union collapsed when the United States was under
a Republican administration could not but bolster this image. Some
ideologues even credit President Ronald Reagan's resolute anti-communism
and increased military expenditures for the fall of the Soviet
Union.
The extinction of socialism and communism in
central and eastern Europe and in parts of Africa and Asia in
the 1990s was accompanied
by two contradictory tendencies. On the one hand, the world witnessed
a new wave of democratization and on the other systemic options
narrowed as political parties rushed to a center that was drifting
rightwards. Some even proclaimed the emergence of "third way" politics.
In effect, this represented the retreat of leftwing and social
democratic parties to the right.
In the U.S. where ideological space has historically
tended to be narrower than in western Europe, the ideological
gap between
the two major parties virtually disappeared except on the question
of "values" as increasingly defined by the right. The
administration of President Bill Clinton did not fundamentally
challenge the rightward drift of American politics; instead it
appropriated Republican economic and social policies notwithstanding
populist rhetoric to the contrary and Clinton's own personal popularity
among various Democratic constituencies including African Americans.
The ideological disarmament of the Democratic Party – its failure
to articulate policies fundamentally different from the Republican
Party – left America's politics open to appropriation by the true
proprietors of the conservative agenda, the Republicans. Why purchase
a copy when you can get the original at the price of the same vote?
From the 1990s the United States became the
lone and increasingly lonely Superpower. The restructuring of
the world system was captured
in the rather fuzzy concept of "globalization," that
a new era had emerged characterized by the rapid flows of commodities
and capital, ideas and individuals, and values and viruses. Above
all, globalization was seen as an economic and technological phenomenon
that threatened to erode the sovereignty of the state and the sanctity
of local cultures and identities. Much of what is said about globalization
is "globaloney," more a projection of contemporary anxieties
and aspirations than a description of the actual processes of global
interconnectedness. But there can be little doubt that a kind of
global reflexivity has emerged fanned by the media, international
migrations, and the propensity of politicians to blame national
problems on malicious or uncontrollable foreign forces.
The possibilities and perils of globalization
have engendered transnationalisms and nationalisms everywhere.
For the U.S. globalization
gave cause for celebration and concern, celebration in so far as
its industries and institutions were among the major benefactors
and beneficiaries of globalization, and concern in that it promised
to shift the measure of global power from military prowess to economic
competitiveness. The burst of the dot.com bubble and onset of recession
at the turn of the new century reinforced these fears, and was
articulated in the recent election in terms of "outsourcing
our jobs."
Then there was September 11. Much has been written
about how the Bush Administration squandered global goodwill expressed
in the
immediate aftermath of the attacks by embarking on a policy of
haughty unilateralism that alienated many of its western allies
and provoked unprecedented hostility in many parts of the world.
This imperial hubris, to use the title of one of the many books
by thoughtful American commentators that has attacked the Bush
administration's dangerous and deluded war on terror, served the
interests of an administration desperate for legitimacy after the
botched elections of 2000, as well as of the neo-conservative cabal
bent on recapturing the military glory of US imperialism buried
in the killing fields of Vietnam.
It could also be said that terrorism became
a substitute for communism, a new enemy essential for a permanent
war economy and necessary
to produce nationalism and promote patriotism in this new era of "globalization." For
a country that spends nearly half of the world's military expenditures
enemies are essential and the more ubiquitous they are the better.
The association of terrorism with Islam rests on and rekindles
deep-seated anti-Islamic memories in Western culture and the fact
that the threat is largely seen as stateless (following the overthrow
of the Taliban in Afghanistan) reinforces the notion that this
is indeed a clash of civilizations that antedate modern states.
This serves to particularize and primordialize
global terrorism, depicting it as an upsurge of evil that has
nothing to do with
the policies of successive U.S. governments, including those of
the current Bush administration. It encourages Americans to ask
the question: "Why do they hate us?" The obvious self-serving
answer: "Because of our way of life, our freedoms, our wealth;
in short because of who we are." And so the despicable war
in Iraq is portrayed as a heroic effort to bestow democracy upon
a long-suffering people (forget the previous justification about
weapons of mass destruction). Spreading democracy and freedom as
an alibi for a country that has difficulty running its own elections
and has historically not respected the democratic rights and civil
liberties of its minorities.
It is hard for outsiders to understand how so many people in the
world's most powerful nation with a massive media industry and
intellectual resources can be so fooled. But perhaps it should
not be if the astonishing monopolies of power in the U.S. political
economy are understood. There is less diversity of opinion in the
American media than in many African countries, for example, because
of concentrations of media ownership. The sycophancy of the mainstream
American media would shock many of the courageous African journalists
who mercilessly attack their governments. Imperial supremacy requires
the constant production of the rhetoric of righteousness and when
that power is a settler society with populations from around the
world such cruel fictions also serve to produce and police citizenship.
The languages of empire abroad and race at home are interminably
linked: Having domestic racial others who have been abused for
centuries has provided the United States with the vocabulary of
derision for foreigners. It is not a coincidence that the loudest
supporters of white supremacy and imperial supremacy are to be
found among Christian fundamentalists, a key voting bloc in the
Republican Party. They would like to roll back many of the gains
of civil rights and any perceived threats to American global power.
President Bush's second term will attempt to
do the first through anticipated judicial appointments to the
Supreme Court and other
domestic policy initiatives and the second through a savage war
in Iraq and renewed threats against the so-called "rogue states." But
the aggressive pursuit of these objectives offers the possibilities
of reversing the republicanization of America as the forces that
have arisen in opposition to this decades-long process and project
are galvanized and strengthened in the coming years.
Dr.
Paul Tiyambe Zeleza is a Professor of African Studies
and History at Pennsylvania State University, former Director
of the Center for African Studies at the University of Illinois
(1995-2003), author of various books and recipient of major
awards. A successful institutional builder, with personal research
and institutional grants since 1995 at $4,124,000, he is also
the 1994 Noma Award winner for publishing A Modern Economic
History of Africa and, in 1998, a Special Commendation
of the Noma Award for Manufacturing African Studies and
Crises. |