The myth of majority rule
By Fred
Goldstein
The entire capitalist establishment are biting their nails
about the Gore-Bush dogfight over the White House. They're
aghast at the conflict's escalation as each side tries to
counter the other.
But the tension in the boardrooms, media and think tanks
isn't over which candidate will come out on top. It's about
how the system will fare.
Who wins and who loses undoubtedly concerns particular
factions of the ruling class. But the broader establishment's
anxiety is over how to insure--in the face of all the
contradictions and reported irregularities--that the masses
of people at home and abroad see the elections as
"legitimate" and that the "process" of so-called democratic
majority rule works.
The capitalist media's job is to manipulate the debate so
that, whatever happens, bourgeois ideology triumphs and the
masses see the issues in the narrow framework defined by
them.
Media remove racism from debate
In the quest for legitimacy, every detail of the balloting
process, electoral law and political maneuvering is being
chronicled by the corporate media. But one thing that has
been hermetically sealed off from the debate is the enormous
issue of racist disenfranchisement of millions of Black and
Latino people. This has been accomplished through laws taking
away the voting rights of those labeled "convicted
felons."
In fact, none of the mainstream U.S. media picked up on a
story in the Guardian of Britain Nov. 14. It states, "Al Gore
may have lost America's presidential election not because of
a badly designed ballot, dubious counting practices in
Florida or the defection of Ralph Nader, but because of the
criminal justice policy he and Bill Clinton have pursued for
eight years."
The article, using Sentencing Project statistics, shows
that 4.2 million people were not allowed to vote Nov. 7 and
that about 1.8 million of them were Black. "The Clinton-Gore
administration," continues the Guardian, "has been heavily
criticized by penal experts for its 'war on drugs' which has
led to more than 400,000 people being jailed, a
disproportionate number being Black and Latino."
The Guardian quotes Cedric Muhammed, editor of the
Blackelectorate.com Web site, who wrote that "if [Gore] and
his supporters are honest, they may have to blame the
Clinton-Gore administration and a criminal justice system
that locked up Blacks wholesale over the last eight years for
non-violent offenses."
Sasha Abramsky, writing in Mother Jones Nov. 8, estimated
that three quarters of a million people in Florida alone were
disenfranchised because of the felon laws. Florida is one of
13 states that bar people from voting for life if they are
convicted of a felony.
In a pre-election Mother Jones article Oct.17, Abramsky
cited the New York-based Brennan Center for Justice, which
filed suit against this practice in Florida on Sept. 21. The
suit showed that more than 6 percent of Florida's voting-age
population cannot vote.
'Felon' laws hearken
back to Jim Crow
The last time so many Black people were legally prevented
from voting, said a Brennan Center attorney, "was before the
Voting Rights Act, when you had literacy tests and poll taxes
and so on."
"All of these laws were overturned," wrote Abramsky,
"except for the web of laws created in the late 19th and 20th
centuries, relating to those convicted of felonies. These
laws were specifically designed by antebellum Southern
politicians to bar Blacks from the ballot box. Indeed, when
Alabama adopted such a law in 1901, John Knox, the politician
presiding over the constitutional convention, stated that the
aim of such provisions was to help preserve white supremacy
without directly challenging the Constitution of the United
States."
It's estimated that 33 percent of all Black males in 13
Southern states are disenfranchised as a result of this
legacy of slavery and segregation.
If the Gore forces had wanted to, they could have long ago
made a huge issue out of this, and they probably would have
won hands down. But being representatives of the racist
ruling class first and foremost, just as the Bush forces are,
they would rather jeopardize their own chance for the White
House than to open up a struggle against the racist denial of
democratic rights for millions of Black and Latino
people.
This is perhaps the most important social and political
fact brought to light by the election fight. And it cries out
for a voting-rights struggle to overturn these so-called
"felony" laws, as well as the "tough-on-crime, war-on-drugs"
policies of the Reagan-Bush and Clinton-Gore years. These are
vicious forms of racial profiling.
Furthermore, Gore, Warren Christopher, William Daley and
other high Democratic officials have not addressed the
exclusion of ballots and the racist harassment on Election
Day in heavily Black districts of Palm Beach county. They
haven't addressed the sit-in by Black students from Florida
A&M, Tallahassee Community College and Florida State
University against the Democrats' arch-enemy, Bush loyalist
and Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris. Nor have
they denounced the racist pro-Bush thugs who attempted to
block a West Palm Beach rally called by Jesse Jackson.
Myth of 'majority rule'
Rather than focus on fundamental issues such as racism,
the capitalist media have the entire population riveted on
the increasingly ugly details of the political knife fight
between the capitalist parties.
What the media are really fighting to preserve is the
fundamental concept, drummed into the head of every school
child, that democracy means the majority rules and the masses
of people get their legitimate political representation
through the two-party electoral process.
If Bush should win the electoral vote with a minority of
the popular vote, this would call into question the Electoral
College system. The ruling class, much to its dislike, might
have to engage in a debate about correcting the system. This
in itself is destabilizing.
If Gore should win with the majority of the popular vote,
the ruling class could breathe a sigh of relief on the
question of majority rule. But they would probably still have
to go through a process of reassessing the Electoral College.
New York Senator-elect Hillary Rodham Clinton has already
called for its abolition.
The Electoral College is a reactionary institution
designed by landed aristocrats, slave owners and businessmen
in 1789 to flout the will of the masses should they get out
of hand. Of all the electoral systems employed in the modern
imperialist countries, it is the most unfavorable to
independent electoral action by the working class and
progressives. Certainly the workers and oppressed should take
the opportunity to intervene in any struggle over the
revamping of this system.
But it must be understood that, even if Gore emerges the
winner, his popular-vote victory does not legitimize the
election results for the masses. If Bush wins with a minority
of the popular vote, it is not this alone that casts the
election's legitimacy into doubt.
The people don't rule--the rich do
The entire election process is illegitimate as an exercise
in majority rule.
Whatever the outcome, the majority of the people will not
rule--they will be ruled by a tiny minority of the rich.
Two rich white men are running at the head of two parties
controlled by billionaires with world corporate empires that
exploit hundreds of millions of workers every day. This is
the class truth about this election and every presidential
election in this country over the past century.
Corruption and political dirty tricks, bribery and
unprincipled partisanship are rife in capitalist elections,
particularly when the parties are fighting to get their hands
on the right to dispense close to $2 trillion to their
friends and collaborators and to make thousands of political
appointments.
But even if every vote winds up being counted
correctly--that is, the way the voter intended--and even if
every improperly excluded vote were included, the assumption
that this election thereby becomes legitimate is a complete
fraud.
Ronald Reagan won by a significant majority in 1980 and
proceeded to open up a huge anti-labor offensive, a racist
attack on the poor and a $2-trillion military build-up.
Lyndon Johnson won in 1964 by the biggest landslide in
history against Barry Goldwater, and then proceeded to send
half a million troops to Vietnam. He sent U.S. troops into
Detroit's Black community during a rebellion against racism
and poverty, killing many.
The majority of the people are workers, including a large
number who bear the burden of national oppression as well as
class oppression. As a class, they are not enfranchised in
any capitalist election. On the contrary. Their oppressors
have the legal and political right, under the capitalist U.S.
Constitution, to continue upholding the system of
exploitation, racism and imperialist expansion.
The majority of the people make society run. They do all
the work. If they really ruled, there would not be people
sleeping on the streets while the rich lived in luxury.
If the majority really ruled, 1 percent of the population
would not have as much wealth as 90 percent of the people.
There would be no racist police shooting and beating people.
There would not be hundreds of thousands of families waiting
for childcare. There would not be 43 million people without
health care or a 20-percent child-poverty rate.
If the majority ruled, they would not permit the epidemic
of occupational deaths and injuries or environmental
destruction. Every worker would have a union. The elections
would not be controlled by the rich.
None of these evils would exist because the majority--if
they really ruled--would abolish them immediately. After all,
it's the majority that suffers from these evils. But they are
unable to eliminate them as long as the capitalists, their
state, and their parties are in charge.
There's no such thing as a "fair election" when the
workers are confined to the program and candidates of their
class enemy.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
Subscribe wwnews-subscribe@workersworld.net
Support independent news http://www.workers.org/orders/donate.php)
HOME
:: U.S. NEWS ::
WORLD NEWS ::
EDITORIALS
:: SUBSCRIBE ::
DONATE
Email
this article
Printable
page