It’s Not Just The Economy, Stupid.

By Jim Weller
3 November 2004

Hello friends. Wake up and smell the gun smoke.

It is 9:37 a.m. in Berkeley, California, and John Kerry, the unfortunate leader of the too little, too late Democratic opposition, has conceded electoral defeat.

The blood-stained hands of George Bush and Richard Cheney are raised in exultation, and the crypto-fascist cadres of Republican demagogues standing balefully behind them are sharpening their battle-axes.

Gird your loins and say your prayers, for today, the People's Resistance begins. The Democratic Party, as we knew it, has had its last hurrah. If any hope is left for the formerly democratic Republic of the United States, it will be in a resolute and stone-cold serious National Resistance Party.

There can be no more equivocating political gamesmanship. The Republican strategists are playing for keeps, and believe me, their strategy from here on in is all-out war; scorched earth.

The re-elected Bush Dynasty will, in short order and irredeemably, make the United States Public Enemy Number One everywhere in the world. You think you’ve seen shock and awe in Baghdad? You ain’t seen nothing yet.

U.S. military forces will soon be engaged in catastrophic warfare far beyond Iraq. As wars of resistance against the U.S. imperium spread throughout the Middle East, expect policies of aggression from Washington that will make the present state of war in Iraq look like the shoot-out at the O.K. Corral.

Expect killing fields in Palestine such as have not been known since the medieval crusades; since the fabled ancient Israelites’ conquests in Canaan.

Bush has not committed himself to deploying new battle-field nuclear weapons for no particular reason. In Teheran, in Damascus, and in Pyongyang, there is every reason to worry.

Expect the economy to continue going to hell in a hand basket. That is part of the Grand Old Party’s plan. The Republican junta has learned well the political lessons of the Third Reich. While the military industrialists prosper, and the super-rich continue to appropriate for themselves the wealth of the nation, widespread economic disintegration will play into the hands of the warmongers and national security freaks.

Meanwhile, the class struggle in this country will continue unabated, as it has since the founding days, but with greater violence and intensity than ever before. The fault lines in this country’s socio-political topography have never been more apparent. The mythology of the middle class will now become obvious shadowplay to all but the stupidest and most selfish.

Listen up, people: The time has come to finally decide which side you are on.

Soon, Bush will appoint the next Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and a replacement on the high court for William Rehnquist. No prizes for guessing correctly that these will be far-right extremists who will start up their chain saws immediately and have another go at the edifices of civil liberty and social justice that still remain standing.

As David S. Broder and Richard Morin write in the Washington Post today (Wednesday, November 3, 2004; Page A01),

The hard-fought 2004 fight for the presidency reflected both deep-seated social divisions in the country and the polarizing effects of Iraq, the economy and the war on terrorism.

The decision to invade Iraq split the electorate almost evenly, according to the polling, although more think it is going badly than going well. Those who opposed the war and those who think it is failing went 4 to 1 for Kerry. Supporters of the Iraq policy and optimists backed Bush by equally lopsided ratios.

The issue agenda varied by state. In Ohio, the economy and jobs topped the list, named by almost twice as many voters as those who singled out Iraq. But in New Hampshire, the reverse was true. And in Florida, terrorism topped both Iraq and the economy.

One voter in five said moral values were the most important issue driving the vote, and almost eight out of 10 of them backed Bush. Terrorism was almost as high in importance, and 85 percent of voters citing it also supported the president. Kerry found his strongest support -- more than 80 percent -- among those who named the economy, jobs and the war in Iraq as their most important concerns.

It is clear that not only must we patiently convince people with whom we’d rather not associate at all that war is not the answer; we must radically change their understanding of moral values.

We must unremittingly teach the truth that terrorism is the consequence of the violence and injustice we inflict upon the world, not just an evil inflicted on us by our enemies. They are our enemies for good reasons. Osama bin Laden is correct in telling us our security is in our own hands.

We must commit our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor to dismantling the structures of economic injustice that have brought us to the dire place where we are. No longer will privileged liberals and bourgeois conservatives be able to occupy the relatively high places while the teeming masses toil and glean disconsolately below.

We must convince Republicans and Democrats alike that it is not just the economy and jobs with which we all need to be ultimately concerned. There is a deep, implacable, xenophobic, religious fundamentalist, racist Weltanschauung abroad in this nation, which simply must be converted if we are not to descend into a new civil war.

As Broder and Morin report,

Overall, white voters were favoring Bush by about 54 percent to 44 percent -- similar to his 2000 share. The exit poll indicated that about 22 percent of yesterday's voters were white evangelical or born-again Christians. White House strategists had made a major effort to recruit more voters from that group, but no comparable figure for 2000 was available.

A reactionary inversion of universal human morality, which has overcome the imagination and the common sense of the people of the United States of America, now threatens this country and the world with devastation and desolation.

My friends, the time to rise up in a permanent national resistance movement has come at last. This will take us the rest of our lives, and we will surely be called on to sacrifice much.

God help us.

Yet there is hope. Today’s Washington Post story continues,

Another notable feature of the election was the Kerry edge among voters younger than 30. Their ranks grew as much as those of older voters, who usually are much more reliable in showing up at the polls. And those between 18 and 29 -- one-sixth of the electorate -- were going for Kerry by 13 points last night.

We, who were under 30 in “the movement” of the late 1960’s, must now pass on our socio-political legacy to the young of this era. We ought by now to have learned the lessons of the intervening decades, how the corrupt consumer capitalist system invidiously co-opts the moral aspirations of youth, and suffocates their incipient liberation movements.

We must not let this happen again to our children. We must join with them, and educate them in the ethics of resistance, and arm them with real humanitarian morality, for it is they who will carry the revolution forward after us.

These youth, whom we must support in their radicalization with us, under our tutelage, and in collaboration with us, will not be well served by the inept Democratic partisan forms that have failed us this day.

We must build with them a committed National Resistance Party that will not turn from the demand of the people for liberation, and will resolutely speak the truth to power, demanding reform, and committing to patiently convert the hearts and minds of our benighted neighbors.

Let us remember the immortal words of Frederick Douglass, away back in 1857:

This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.