[Mb-civic] The Nation | Endorsement

[Barbara Siomos]

    John Kerry for President
    The Nation | Endorsement
    08 November 2004 Issue

    The presidential campaign debates are over, and the time for
decision has come. The Nation endorses Senator John Kerry to be the next
President of the United States.
 
    Any stocktaking must begin, of course, by comparing the
records of Kerry and George W. Bush. Yet the upshot of such a detailed
comparison, though entirely favoring Kerry, is not our principal reason
for supporting him. To make clear why, despite strong disagreements with
Kerry, we not only recommend a vote for him but do so with fervor, we
must step back from the candidates and their positions and set forth an
independent view of what we believe are the stakes in this election. 

    The most important is the consequence it will have in what
has emerged as a crisis of American democracy. The crisis began on
December 12, 2000, when Bush was chosen to be President by the Supreme
Court. The gift of a true electoral mandate now to this previously
unelected President would give fresh legitimacy and momentum to all his
disastrous policies. And that new momentum could in turn place our
constitutional system itself at risk.
 
    This magazine's disagreements with Kerry are deep and touch
on fundamental matters. We believed that the invasion of Iraq was "the
wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time" (as he now describes
it) before the war was ever launched; he has come to that conclusion
only recently, having voted to authorize the war. We believe the United
States should withdraw from Iraq; he wants to "win" the war there. We
think the military budget should be cut; he plans to increase it, adding
40,000 troops. (For what, exactly? to fight another wrong war, at the
wrong place, at the wrong time?) We reject pre-emptive war; he embraces
it. We oppose the wall that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is
building on Palestinian lands; he supports it. We believe in the
elimination of all nuclear weapons; he wants only to stop their spread.
He calls for significant expansion of healthcare; we call for a
single-payer system that would cover everyone. He opposes gay marriage;
we back it. If he wins the election, The Nation will pursue each of
these differences vigorously.
 
    But while we have sharp differences with Kerry, we believe
he has the qualities required for the presidency. He is more than
"anybody but Bush." His instincts are decent. He is a man of high
intelligence, deep knowledge and great resolve. At times in his
life--notably, when he opposed the Vietnam War--he has shown exemplary
courage. He respects the law. He believes in cooperation with other
countries and has the inclination and ability to bring America out of
its current isolation and back into the family of nations. As a senator,
he demonstrated concern for social welfare and has backed this up with
enlightened policy proposals. He has supported civil rights and labor
rights and opposed racism. He has supported the rights of women,
including the right to an abortion. He has been an advocate of nuclear
arms control and opposed the almost incomprehensibly provocative nuclear
policies of the Bush Administration. He would rescind the most unfair of
Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy. He would be a friend of the environment
and return the United States to the negotiations on global warming. 

    The Bush Record
 
    As for Bush, where to begin the list of his mistakes,
delusions, deceptions, follies, tragedies and crimes? Where to end it?
 
    He failed to respond to repeated clear warnings of an Al
Qaeda attack ("Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the U.S.," the CIA told
him) and displayed startling incompetence when the attack came. Then he
tried to cover up both failures by opposing the formation of the
September 11 Commission, obstructing the committee's work once it was
formed and denying key findings once they were disclosed. (To this day,
Vice President Cheney asserts a link between Al Qaeda and Saddam
Hussein.)
 
    In the name of fighting terror, Bush waged a war in Iraq
that had nothing to do with terrorism and was as unjustified when it was
begun as, after the loss of thousands of Iraqi and American lives, it is
unwinnable now. He has inaugurated an immoral and unsustainable policy
of global hegemony based on military force, estranged most of the
country's principal friends around the world and dismayed the world at
large--which has begun, indirectly but pervasively, to resist US
domination. He mocked the United Nations as "irrelevant" and defied the
Security Council. Today our forces are overstretched in pursuit of
delusional goals.
 
    Bush's policies have turned away from the country's
tradition of seeking disarmament exclusively by diplomatic means and
adopted force as the mainstay of its nonproliferation efforts, violently
pursuing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, where there were none, and
overlooking them in Pakistan and North Korea, where they existed. All
the while, his Administration further provoked and disturbed the world
by pursuing the development of new, "usable" varieties of nuclear
weapons, to be employed for new purposes against new targets, mostly in
the Third World. He has systematically cast aside or weakened
environmental initiatives, domestic and international. He withdrew from
negotiations to address global warming, which except for nuclear war is
the gravest danger facing the world; sponsored a Clear Skies Act that
fouled the air; gutted regulations limiting strip-mining; and sold off
public lands to oil, gas, timber and mining companies; rejected fuel
conservation measures; tried to suppress or repudiate the science on
which knowledge of environmental hazards is based. 

    And while thus conspiring to discredit these and other
scientific findings, he has pandered to a "base" of religious fanatics,
many of whom are looking forward to a day of "rapture" when Jesus
returns to earth and kills everyone but them. His attitude to the
factual world in general is one of hostility and rejection. He has made
fraud and fantasy foundations of his Administration. His own belief in
something--that Iraq was a threat to the United States, for
example--appears to be evidence enough for him that it is true. One of
his advisers has mocked his critics by stating that they live in a
"reality-based community," explaining, "We're an empire now, and when we
act, we create our own reality."
 
    Bush has by almost every measure worsened the US economy and
set it on a path to likely disaster. He has taken hundreds of billions
of dollars from the poor and people of ordinary income and given it to
the rich through tax cuts (if you dare to point this out, you are
accused of waging "class warfare") while driving the country into
unprecedented federal debt and trade deficits, delivering the nation's
finances to the decisions of foreign creditors. He has increased our
dependence on foreign energy sources. His approach to the economy and
our resources is the same as to the environment--this putative believer
in a "responsibility society" strip-mines the future to gratify the
present.
 
    Bush has broken his oath to uphold the laws of the United
States. He asserted and made use of an array of "inherent" powers
nowhere mentioned in the Constitution: to lock up and place in solitary
confinement American citizens and others, with no access to courts or
even legal representation; to withhold information from the public and
Congressional committees; to detain hundreds of people outside domestic
and international law in the legal no man's land of Guantánamo; and
to permit the torture of prisoners.
 
    He has governed through fear and intimidation. His party
will not tolerate dissent either in its own ranks, from which it purges
any moderate voice, or in the country at large, where his Administration
insinuates that his opponents are in league with America's enemies. At
his rallies, composed of carefully vetted supporters, people who oppose
him have been thrown out and even arrested.
 
    A Dangerous Mandate
 
    A matchup of the records of the two candidates only begins
to measure the stakes in this year's election. These come fully into
view only in the larger context of a deeper crisis that has overtaken
the American system of government. To begin with, the irregular
procedure of the last election lends a special importance to this one.
In 2000 candidate Bush, who lost the popular contest by half a million
votes and was put into the presidency by a Supreme Court decision,
failed to receive a popular mandate. However, he embarked on a radical,
right-wing course anyway, compounding the insult to democracy. Yet it is
so far only the government that has asserted global imperial ambition,
waged aggressive war on false pretexts, condoned torture, strengthened
corporate influence over politics, turned its back on the natural
environment and spurned global public opinion. If Bush is now elected,
then a national majority--a far weightier thing--will stand behind these
things. The consequences would be profound. A crippled presidency would
begin to walk on two legs. At home, public affirmation would turn the
record of the first term, now having been inspected and approved by the
people, into the starting point for an accelerated movement in the same
general direction. Bush has already put through a new round of federal
budget-wrecking corporate tax cuts, called for new repressive
legislation in a Patriot II act and clearly announced his desire to
"democratize" not just Iraq but the entire Middle East. Abroad, such a
vote would deepen and confirm the United States' separation from the
rest of the world, enclosing it in an eccentric and dangerous
mini-climate of ignorance and lies.
 
    On the other hand, if Bush is defeated, his entire
presidency will acquire the aspect of an aberration, a mistake that has
been corrected, and the American people will be able to say: We never
accepted Bushism. We rejected the brutality, the propaganda, the
misbegotten wars, the imperial arrogance. And we never, ever chose
George W. Bush to be President of the United States.
 
    What Is at Stake
 
    But even these stakes are not the largest on the table in
November. The largest and most important is the protection of American
democracy. It is always difficult while enjoying the comforts and
privileges of taken-for-granted liberties to imagine that they could be
lost; but the elements of Bush's misrule have plainly converged to form
this threat. It is the wars of aggression designed to expand imperial
sway abroad that produce the fear that fuels his campaign. It is the
transfer of money from the poor or average majority to the rich few and
corporations that cultivates the allegiance of the corporate chieftains
who swell Bush's campaign coffers while at the same time helping to
bring the news media, now owned mostly by large companies, to heel. It
is the media that amplify his Administration's war propaganda while
failing to expose the deceptions put forward as justification for war
and puffing up the bubble of illusion whose creation is perhaps the
Administration's top priority. And it is government secrecy and Justice
Department repression and a right-wing judiciary that chills the dissent
that tries to puncture the bubble of illusion. The upshot is a
concentration of power in the Republican Party that has no parallel in
American history, including the Gilded Age and the Nixon era.
 
    It is not only all three branches of government that have
fallen largely into the same hands; it is the corporations, the military
(which tends to vote Republican) and, increasingly, the communications
industry, which are either propaganda arms of the party, as in the case
of Fox News and other outlets of the Rupert Murdoch media empire, or
else simply bow to the pressure of Administration threats and popular
anxiety. 

    Even before Bush's selection by Supreme Court fiat in 2000,
a dangerous pattern had asserted itself at the top levels of American
institutional life. The Republican Party embarked on a process of using
legitimately won power to acquire more power illegitimately. In the
impeachment proceedings against President Clinton for lying to a grand
jury about sex, the Republican majority in Congress abused its power in
the legislative branch to try to strike down the leader of the rival
executive branch. The attempt failed. In the election of 2000, the party
in effect abused the judicial power to seize the presidency for itself,
and this time the attempt succeeded. The deed was in fact a culmination
of a long, deliberate (if not conspiratorial) campaign of politicization
of the judiciary, pushed by right-wing legislators as well as such
groups as the Federalist Society. In a series of reapportionment
battles, notably the one waged by House majority leader Tom DeLay in
Texas, the party used legislative power to entrench itself in that same
legislature. Meanwhile, a web of think tanks and other institutions,
supposedly independent but actually de facto instruments of the
Republican Party, was created. They cooperated in vetting political
loyalists for government posts and in flooding the news media with
apologists for the party and its policies. Under DeLay's leadership, the
Congressional Republicans, leaving no stone unturned, have sought to
take over even the lobbying establishment of Washington by threatening
firms that hire former Democrats to work for them. 

    The persistent theme of these policies and actions, domestic
and international, is to acquire power--to seize it, to increase it and
to keep it for good. A systemic crisis--a threat to the Constitution of
the United States--has taken shape. At the end of this road is an
implied vision of a different system: a world run by the United States
and a United States run permanently by the Republican Party, which is to
say imperial rule abroad, one-party rule at home. Somewhere along that
road lies a point of no return. It is in the nature of warnings in
general that you cannot know whether the danger in question will come,
or be averted by timely action, or perhaps never present itself at all.
But it's also in the nature of warnings that one must act on them before
it is too late, and this is especially true in the case of threats to
democracy. That is why the danger to democracy takes primacy over other
perils that are in themselves greater, including nuclear war and
irreversible damage to the ecosphere through global warming. (It is
notable that none of these three perils has been more than glancingly
mentioned in the election debates that have just ended.) 

    No one can know when or how the decisive test of democracy
might arrive. It could come quickly, perhaps in a crackdown following
another terrorist attack on American soil, this time conceivably on a
far greater scale than September 11, or it could come slowly, in a
protraction of the process, already well under way, of gradual
strangulation of independent institutions, amounting to a coup in
slow-motion--a hardening of an informal monopoly of power into a formal
monopoly--leaving the institutions of democracy technically intact but
corrupted and hollowed out from within, helpless to resist a central
authority that has drawn all real power into its own hands.
 
    Although the precise steps by which a systemic breakdown
might occur are obscure, most of the main elements of the danger seem to
be contained in microcosm in one episode--the torture at the Abu Ghraib
prison in Iraq and elsewhere in the United States' nascent global gulag
archipelago. The story begins with a secret memo from Alberto Gonzales,
the White House counsel to the President and most frequently mentioned
name for a Bush appointment to the Supreme Court, recommending that he
issue a "finding" that neither international law, in the form of the
Geneva Conventions, nor US law, in the shape of the War Crimes Act (18
US Code, Section 2441) was applicable to abuses of prisoners in
Afghanistan. The "war on terror," he said, was a "new paradigm,"
rendering provisions of the Geneva Conventions "quaint." As for US law,
a presidential determination would help tormentors brought to justice by
creating "a reasonable basis in law that Section 2441 does not apply,
which would provide a solid defense to any future prosecution." Even
before the crimes were committed, the White House was planning how to
beat the rap. In one short memo, a new vision of law came into view. In
this vision, the executive was freed from legal accountability as well
as Congressional oversight, while at the same time the individual person
was stripped of his fundamental human rights. It was law--if "law" is
the right word for it at all--cut to imperial specifications.
 
    A blizzard of other memos justifying the abuse of prisoners
followed from lawyers at the Pentagon and the Justice Department, and
soon Defense Secretary Rumsfeld had authorized several new varieties of
torment for the prisoners at Guantánamo. Not long after that, the
superintendent of Guantánamo, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, traveled
to Iraq to teach the command there the new interrogation arts. To the
surprise of the Administration, the war was not going well, and the
military command was hungry for intelligence from the prisoners at Abu
Ghraib and elsewhere. A memo had gone out from a captain in intelligence
stating, "The gloves are coming off gentlemen regarding these detainees.
Col. Boltz has made it clear that we want these individuals broken."
 
    They were. In the recently published report "AR 15-6
Investigation of the Abu Ghraib Detention Facility and 205th Military
Intelligence Brigade" by Maj. Gen. George Fay, cited in The New York
Review of Books by Mark Danner, we read:
In October 2003, DETAINEE-07, reported alleged multiple incidents of
physical abuse while in Abu Ghraib. DETAINEE-07 was an MI hold and
considered of potentially high value. He was interrogated on 8, 21 and
29 October; 4 and 23 November and 5 December. DETAINEE-07's claims of
physical abuse (hitting) started on his first day of arrival. He was
left naked in his cell for extended periods, cuffed in his cell in
stressful positions ("High cuffed"), left with a bag over his head for
extended periods, and denied bedding or blankets. DETAINEE-07 described
being made to "bark like a dog, being forced to crawl on his stomach
while MPs spit and urinated on him, and being struck causing
unconsciousness."

    The overthrow of law by legal-sounding phrases penned in
secret; the laws of the Republic falling before the demands of empire;
nullification of any check or balance on the President; suspension of
fundamental human rights; a tangle of contradictory bureaucratic memos;
blind imperial ambition leading to catastrophic war; mayhem and failure
in that war unfolding behind a shimmering screen of high-sounding
phrases extolling the spread of democracy; panicked resort to criminal
emergency measures; torture and other outrages against human dignity
hidden behind a battery of euphemisms ("sleep adjustment," "setting the
conditions" for interrogation); the pre-organized rejection of any
accountability, including that imposed by the articles of the US
criminal code: Are these not the main features we might expect to see
writ large if a full-scale collapse of the Constitution of the United
States were to come? 

    Safeguarding Democracy
 
    And that brings us back to the election and our endorsement
of John Kerry. The most important reason to vote for John Kerry in
November is to safeguard democracy in America.
 
    Kerry's election would not necessarily save, and Bush's
election would not necessarily destroy, democratic government in the
United States. Even as President, even "in power," Kerry might well find
himself "in opposition." In that case, he would need all the help from
ordinary people he could get, and there's good reason to believe it
would be forthcoming. The impeachment of Clinton failed, but it
demonstrated the strength of the assault on legitimate government that
can be waged not by the presidency but upon the presidency--and that was
in peacetime. Clinton, after all, began his two terms in office with all
three branches of government in Democratic hands but ended with all
three in Republican hands. (His presidency was perhaps the most
brilliant political retreat in American history, but it was a retreat.)
Moreover, Kerry has given his right-wing opponents powerful ammunition.
By pledging to win a war in Iraq that is unwinnable, he may have put his
foot in a trap that would snap shut once he was in office, leaving him
open to the charge of failure. What would the party that impeached
Clinton for sex and lies do to a President who presided over the "loss"
of Iraq in the midst of the "war on terror"?
 
    If Bush is elected, the role of popular activism in support
of the democratic system would be even more important. Roughly half the
country dissents from Bushism. The antiwar movement, and now the
campaign itself, have generated widespread and intense opposition.
Activism has blossomed. New progressive organizations have been founded
and will outlast the election. Events are also unlikely to favor the
Administration. Already, its war policy and its fiscal policies are
widely recognized as disasters. Opposition is bound to be strong and can
save the Republic. And let us recall that when President Nixon
threatened the constitutional system thirty years ago, he was driven
from office in disgrace by popular fury. For all its importance, the
election is only one episode in a longer popular struggle, whether Bush
or Kerry is President. Either way, The Nation will devote itself to the
fight.
 
    Yet it remains true that of all the things Americans can now
do to support democracy, the election of John Kerry is the most
important. A Kerry presidency would seriously disrupt the concentration
of power at the heart of the present danger. He might still try to "win"
the Iraq war but would be less likely to wage future wars. His
appointments to the Supreme Court would stop the Court's slide into
unchecked, one-sided partisanship. His control of the bully pulpit would
be a powerful counterforce to the right-wing propaganda that now all but
drowns out other voices in the news media. His control of the agencies
of the executive branch would halt, or at least retard, their merger
with corporate America. More important, the simple structural fact that
the Democrats are the other party would create a counterbalance to the
right-wing power that predominates elsewhere in the system. The
Democrats, including Kerry, have been disappointing champions of their
namesake, democracy, yet the culture of their party is still an
improvement over that of the Republicans. The Democrats are reluctant
imperialists; the Republicans are imperialists by avocation. The
Democratic Party generally wants to defend civil liberties and does so
when it dares; the Republicans, with honorable exceptions, apparently
would sweep them aside. The Democrats prefer social justice, however
weakly they fight for it; the Republicans would give every dollar they
can find to the rich. The Democrats are inclined to limit corporate
power; the Republicans are corporate power.
 
    What can be lost, slowly or abruptly, as the crisis unfolds,
is everything that was lost by Detainee 07. What can be saved--let us
rescue the beautiful word from the cesspool through which the Bush
Administration has dragged it--is freedom.