Despite talk by commentators of a weakened presidency, however, there is no question that the new administration, whether it is headed by Democrat Albert Gore or Republican George W. Bush, will aggressively pursue the bipartisan assault on the social gains and rights of working people at home and seek to advance Washington’s imperialist interests abroad.

The political conflicts behind the harsh rhetoric in big-business circles are not about immediate issues but about the future of U.S. capitalism. They are about the coming confrontations with working people that the ruling billionaire families know they must face because they have failed to break the unions, substantially reverse the gains won by Blacks and other oppressed nationalities, reimpose capitalism in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, or force the peoples of the semicolonial countries to accept their status as oppressed nations under the thumb of imperialism.

The "end of history," touted by bourgeois pundits only recently, proved an illusion. The capitalists and their political representatives know they must take on and defeat working people worldwide to salvage their crisis-ridden profit system. The underlying disputes today are over how best to prepare for these inevitable battles down the road, and at what pace.

Washington does not advance its interests at home or abroad based on respect for "clean" elections, "clear mandates," or the moral authority of its leading officials. They have none of those. U.S. imperialism enforces its interests through force, through the use of its military and economic power within the relationship of forces in the world.

In the November 7 election, the two capitalist politicians virtually tied. Neither won enough electoral votes to be elected, with the outcome in Florida being so close that Gore, after initially conceding, called Bush back in the middle of the night to announce he would fight for that state’s 25 electors, which will decide the race. As we go to press, Bush holds a minuscule lead of 300 votes in Florida.

Each candidate won about 48 percent of the popular vote, Gore getting barely 230,000 more votes than Bush. Each received the votes of about 25 percent of those eligible to cast a ballot.

In the two houses of Congress, Republicans maintained a majority, with the Senate almost evenly split between the two parties.

In Florida, the Gore campaign has pushed for a manual recount in several counties, alleging irregularities. They hope that in these Democratic-dominated counties a recount will tip the balance in favor of their candidate.

In largely Democratic Palm Beach County, for example, they argue that the larger than expected vote of 3,000 for ultrarightist Reform Party candidate Patrick Buchanan was due to a confusing ballot and that many of the Buchanan votes were actually intended for Gore. Election officials in that county rejected 19,000 ballots because more than one presidential candidate had been marked.

Supporters of Bush, who remains ahead, have opposed the recount efforts, and both sides have gone to court to stake out their case--from the Florida Supreme Court to federal appeals courts in Atlanta. Both sides have also organized small street demonstrations in West Palm Beach and elsewhere to support the maneuvers by their respective campaigns.  
 
Protests denying ballots to Blacks
Normal voting irregularities aside, Gore has emerged with one advantage in the dispute: exposure of the number of Blacks who faced difficulty in casting a ballot or were prevented from doing so altogether. The wealthy ruling class in the United States does not want government institutions to unnecessarily appear overtly racist. This political question will weigh in the balance of court rulings on various lawsuits and legal challenges, and in the outcome of the elections.

One example of the extent of the problem was a public hearing organized by the NAACP leadership, which has actively campaigned for Gore, in Miami. Some 500 people, mostly African-Americans and Haitians, packed a church community center there November 11. Donnise DeSouza testified about how she and 15 others were told at a polling station that their names were not on the voter lists and would not be allowed to vote. Fumiko Robinson reported that many of the elderly Blacks she helped carry to the polls in Broward County were similarly turned away.

Other complaints included Haitian-Americans in Miami being prevented from using translators in voting booths and Latino voters in Osceola County who said they had to produce two kinds of ID when one was required. Others accused the Florida Highway Patrol of harassing Blacks by setting up checkpoints near a polling area in a Black community outside Tallahassee.

Such cases, which sound familiar to many working people around the country, especially those who are Black, are a permanent part of the reality of U.S. elections, under Democratic and Republican politicians alike. The Gore forces are trying to use these cases to their advantage.

In that context the Florida Supreme Court rejected a request from Florida secretary of state Katherine Harris to block the manual recounts. The court ruling, while far from the final word, gave the Democrats a boost as officials in Broward and Palm Beach counties began a hand count of 1 million ballots.

Many pundits have noted that Buchanan received relatively few votes, both in Florida and nationally. While the Reform Party candidate admitted that his campaign won less electoral support than he had expected, partly due to health problems that curtailed his campaigning, Buchanan is not primarily looking for votes. He is an incipient fascist politician seeking to recruit a committed cadre that, over time, will become a street-fighting movement posing a deadly threat to the labor movement. Regardless of Buchanan’s vote total, working people have to confront racist, rightist, and fascist-minded forces on the streets today, such as workers standing up to a campaign of thuggery against immigrant workers in Long Island, New York, organized by an ultrarightist outfit.

The stretched-out conclusion of the U.S. presidential elections has precipitated a flood of commentary in the big-business media. Most of the analysis offered today by the "experts," however--about a constitutional crisis, a weakened mandate, a need to "reform" the electoral process, and so on--is hot air.  
 
Factionalism among bourgeois forces
The only crisis is the fact that it is an extremely close election. It’s true that capitalist institutions today are proving more brittle than ever, as seen by the beginning of the breakdown of the two-party system. But there is no reason to think that the new president--Gore or Bush--will be weakened by these elections. He will, in fact, continue the course carried out under Clinton and Congress. The new administration will act, based not on a "public mandate" but on what the ruling class dictates.

To take one well-known example, Harry Truman was elected in 1948 by such a slim margin that major newspapers announced the victory of his opponent, Thomas Dewey. But that didn’t prevent Truman from aggressively carrying out major policies on behalf of the U.S. rulers at home and abroad.

The end of the 2000 election campaign has been marked above all by factionalism among the two major capitalist parties. Democratic campaign manager William Daley denounced the Bush campaign’s efforts to block Gore’s bid in Florida as "an injustice unparalleled in our history."

The New York Post, which supports Bush, ran a front-page editorial November 13 condemning Gore for "the hijacking of the presidency" because of his moves to recount ballots.

In some cases the rhetoric has been coarser. Republican Senate majority leader Trent Lott responded to the election of Hillary Rodham Clinton to the U.S. Senate by joking that lightning might strike her before she joins him in the Capitol. Many supporters of women’s rights sense that--despite the fact that Clinton is no friend of working people--such right-wing attacks on her are actually aimed at every woman who acts like a political person and refuses to accept second-class status.  
 
Conflict is over anticipation of future
The factionalism surrounding the election outcome is not primarily about the present but about the future. Similarly, the bipartisan steps taken by the government in recent years to curtail political space and beef up the police are a threat to working people, but the U.S. rulers are pressing for such moves in anticipation of the inevitable social conflicts of the future, not because of the level of working-class struggle today.

The divisions expressed today are largely ideological ones, not disputes over immediate practical policies. They stem from the historic weakening of U.S. imperialism over the past decades and the challenge the rulers face in taking on the working class and its allies. Despite inroads they have made in attacking workers’ social wage, the U.S. rulers have failed to roll back the basic gains won by working people in the labor battles of the 1930s and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ‘60s. Internationally, they have failed to overthrow the workers states in Russia and elsewhere.

Because the differences are about the future, and compromise cannot be achieved over ideological differences, the factionalism has generated more heat than the immediate situation would justify.

The breakdown in civil tone of debate is part of the increasingly coarsening rhetoric that has marked bourgeois politics for the past decade. This coarseness is often initiated by rightist forces, aimed at heightening resentment in the middle classes and undermining social solidarity among working people. The last major example of this was the impeachment proceedings against President William Clinton early last year, where millions of working people sensed the ultimate target of the rightists who took the initiative was not Clinton but the social gains won by Blacks, women, and working people as a whole.  
 
Bipartisan antilabor offensive
Whether it ends up being Gore or Bush, the new occupant of the White House will, together with Congress, take as its starting point the bipartisan anti-working-class course carried out by the Clinton administration. Under Clinton and Congress, the Democratic-Republican government launched a wide array of attacks on workers’ social wage and democratic rights. This included dismantling "welfare as we know it," which has since led to proposals to "reform" Social Security that begin to undermine its character as a universal entitlement for all working people.

The Clinton administration signed a series of bills that reinforced the size and powers of the hated federal immigration police, put tens of thousands more cops on the street, undermined the constitutional protections against arbitrary search and seizure, and accelerated the use of the death penalty, among other measures aimed against working people.

The moves made by the new administration along this same bipartisan course, however, will meet increased working-class resistance, as the U.S. rulers have discovered in recent years. The very fact that Haitians who were denied to right to vote in Florida are raising a hue and cry today is a reminder of the historic changes that have taken place in U.S. politics and the problems the employers and their government face: an increasingly internationalized working class that is gaining self-confidence and is responding to their attacks.

What vanguard workers and farmers are doing across the country today is preparing for the future, as are the capitalists. But rather than defending the devastation of war, racist assaults, oppression of women, and the brutalities of exploitation that are the hallmarks of capitalist society, the most advanced sections of working people are fighting for a world where social solidarity and mutual collaboration can harness the potential of humanity’s creative and productive powers for all.

Those leading struggles by packinghouse workers, coal miners, farm workers, janitors, garment workers, transportation workers, and others to build unions, defend dignity on the job, and protect past gains; farmers organizing to defend their land and right to a livelihood, who are reaching out to other rural toilers in Cuba, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere; working people fighting anti-immigrant assaults and racist attacks; and working women seeking ways to defend their rights and economic well-being against increasingly harsh conditions can value not only the immediate outcome of their struggles but the fact that it will weigh in the balance down the road as well.

A small but growing number are reading, studying, and helping to distribute Pathfinder books, the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial, and New International. As these battles sharpen, millions begin to see the stakes in battles today for the future and want a scientific understanding of the class struggle, the truth about the world in which they live, and clear working-class answers to the barrage of lies and half-truths that surround them in bourgeois society. Every step in this direction is the counterpart by working people to what the capitalist class is preparing for as well.

It bodes well for the possibility of the front ranks of militant workers and farmers forging links with one another--both within the United States and around the world--and strengthening their mutual struggles in defense of their wages, working conditions, and dignity.  
 
 
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