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.