Meaning of California election
(editorial)
The election of Republican Party candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger as governor of
California in the October 7 recall election was a blow to the Democratic Party
and a boost to the Republicans nationally. His electoral victory was aided by a
Democratic governor tarnished by the energy crisis and the effects of the
economic crisis. The Democratic candidate, Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante, was part
of the Gray Davis administration and was not seen as an alternative.
Schwarzenegger played on the fact that the Davis administration had proposed
increasing taxes to “balance the budget” and had tripled the vehicle
registration fee.
Working people in California were not convinced by the arguments of union
officials who went on a “No recall” drive to mobilize Democratic votes.
They voted in large numbers for Schwarzenegger because of their hatred for
Davis’s record in office. In this period of economic crisis, there is no
ideological loyalty among working people to imperialist liberalism, which is
what the Democratic Party stands for and what the trade union officialdom tries
to tie workers to. The fact is that no significant layer of the population has
loyalty to either big-business party in the United States.
Because Davis’s unpopularity was such a factor in the outcome,
Schwarzenegger’s electoral victory doesn’t automatically translate into
votes for President George Bush’s reelection in 2004. But the strength of the
vote for the Republican candidate dealt a blow to the long-held assumption that
certain states such as California are untouchable by one or the other major
party, and that the Democrats have a lock on the votes of workers, Blacks, and
Latinos.
Despite Davis’s very liberal record over the past two years, half of union
households voted to oust him. Exit polls showed that among Latinos, only 52
percent voted for Bustamante while 40 percent voted for a Republican—31
percent for Schwarzenegger and 9 percent for Thomas McClintock. Even among
voters who are Black, 23 percent voted Republican.
The election results were another sign of the slow shift to the right in
bourgeois politics that goes back to the emergence of William Clinton and of
the “centrist Democrats” as the dominant force in the Democratic Party, and
which continued with the election of Bush as president. Democratic and
Republican politicians above all keep workers and farmers within the bounds of
capitalist politics by promoting patriotism. They foster the myth of “we
Americans,” that is, the false view that working people and the
employers—our exploiters—have common interests.
Despite what some pro-Democratic forces say, Schwarzenegger is not an
ultrarightist. He is not even a right-wing ideological Republican like
McClintock. He is a Republican who took established positions in his party on
the main issues he spoke out on, such as tax cuts. He voiced positions on
several questions—support for a woman’s right to abortion, for gay unions,
for medical marijuana, and for gun control—different from those held by Bush.
This crossover of Democratic voters is not unique—it was the “Reagan
Democrats” who helped elect Ronald Reagan as California governor in 1966 and
then as president in the 1980s. It’s worth remembering that as governor,
Reagan signed a bill liberalizing abortion laws in California four years before
the Supreme Court decriminalized abortion in 1973.
Schwarzenegger’s victory had nothing in common with the 1998 election of
Jesse Ventura as Minnesota governor. Ventura demagogically attacked both the
Democratic and Republican parties as being part of the “establishment.” He
ran as an “independent” and won support by promoting himself as a strongman
figure, supposedly standing above classes, who would sweep out the political
stables and use an iron hand, even at the expense of bourgeois democracy. As it
turned out, Ventura’s Bonapartist-type role was premature for U.S. politics
today and hit a dead end.
Virtually all the other candidates ran within the capitalist framework,
including Peter Camejo of the Green Party, which as usual acted as the left
wing of the Democrats.
The only revolutionary working-class voice in these elections was that of the
Socialist Workers Party candidate, Joel Britton. Socialist Workers campaigners
approached all political questions from the standpoint of the interests of the
working class, including the need for working people to chart a political
course independent of all the capitalist parties.
Britton and the other socialist candidates said: young people and
militant-minded workers don’t have to accept a life of choosing one rotten
bourgeois politician or another. The SWP offers you the opportunity to be part
of building a communist leadership that can forge a revolutionary movement of
workers and farmers to take on the ruling capitalists and bring our class to
power. This is the life to be part of—the fight to bring down U.S.
imperialism, which will remain the biggest threat to humanity until it is
overthrown. Join us!
Related articles:
‘Join the fight to bring down the final empire’
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