Bush and the dyslection. posted by Richard Seymour

The Daily Mail, while not uncritical of Bush, has been positively glowing in the wake of the 'Moral Majority' marching to the Whitehouse. That Bush won the election largely as a result of mobilising the religious right is undoubtedly the case. But where does this majority bullshit come from?

It is worth remembering, with all the talk of a high turnout (60% of all eligible voters - a similar vote in Britain recently was considered the nadir of our constitutional democracy), 70% of US voters did not vote for Bush . Any of you who managed to sit through Channel Four's very lengthy documentary on the religious right and US politics last weekend will have seen David Frum, Bush's one time speechwriter and inventor of the Axis of Evil, explain that most US voters do not support Bush on the key issues, domestic or foreign. The only issues he had substantive support on were, he said, 'value' issues. He had said the same thing on a BBC news programme a month or so ago.

Take a few examples. On tax , most Americans think higher income taxpayers contribute too little (figures range from 63% to 77%), while lower income taxpayers either pay their fair share (35%) or too much (49%). A basic question of distributive justice places most Americans clearly on the social-democratic left.

On foreign policy, overwhelming numbers of Americans support the US subscribing to bans on nuclear testing, the use of landmines and the development of biological and chemical weapons. The Bush administration's willingness to use a nuclear first strike is opposed by 60% of Americans and supported by only 18%. 62% oppose outright the draft.

On abortion , most Americans think abortion should either be legal in all cases or in most cases. On gun control , large majorities favour stricter gun control. Big business is widely distrusted. Etc.

There are many countervailing examples, sure. I am not suggesting that there is an undiluted consensus in favour of socialist revolution in the United States. That will take some doing (perhaps if I write a series of books explaining that God expects the American people to overthrow their corrupt, hedonistic leaders and create the world's first direct democracy?). But although the trend has been to the right in the last few years, there is a whole litany of issues which the left could capitalise on in the event of there being a useful leadership. Unfortunately, the party that has hegemonised the left vote for almost a century in America has nothing to offer on these issues. They consistently compromise or renege on even their most limited agenda for change. This has become so embarrassing that they have ceased to have any agenda to speak of. The mainstream liberal-left unfortunately gave in to the crude emotional blackmail of the Anyone But Bush campaign - no, worse, they were disgracefully complicit in it. (Did Michael Moore really get on his knee and beg Nader not to run, or did I fucking dream it?)

Nader cannot now be blamed for the failure of the Democrats, as he barely registered on the poll. Even if he had registered, the onus would be on the Democrats to learn the lessons of defeat - don't ever insult us with such a prefabricated set of non-policies and non-entities to espouse them again; never again bore us with endless tales of war heroism; stop trying to appropriate the language of the Republicans, because they will always do it better than you. The Democrats were denuded of effective critique over the avalanche of atrocious news from Iraq because they were right there in the centre of the bloodbath, and accepted entirely the lexicon of the 'war on terror'.

As Alex Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair note in Counterpunch :

October surprises? No candidate was more burdened by them than George Bush. Just in the last couple of weeks, headlines brought tidings of US marines killed in Baghdad and other US troops rising up in mutiny against lack of equipment to protect their lives. The president's brother Neil was exposed as influence peddling on the basis of his family connections. The economic numbers remained grim as they have been all year. And this was just the icing on the cake. You can troll back over the past fifteen months and find scarce a headline or news story bringing good tidings for Bush. History is replete with revolutions caused by a rise in the price of bread. This year the price of America's primal fluid--oil--on which every household depends, tripled.

But Kerry and the Democrats were never able to capitalize on any of these headlines, a failure which started when Democrats in Congress, Kerry included, gave the green light to the war on Iraq, and which continued when Kerry conclusively threw away the war and WMD issues in August. When he tried to a chord change at NYU on September 20 it was too late and even then his position remained incoherent. He offered no way out. More tunnel, no light.

And they ask, who will the Democrats and their little helpers blame now that Nader has been forcibly evacuated from the analysis? The voters , of course!