Elections 2004: Religion, Racism and Reaction

Break with the Democrats! We Need a Revolutionary Workers Party!

Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 835, 29 October 2004.

The Bush cabal that occupies the White House is fanatical, arrogant and believes it is doing the work of God. One would think the U.S. were some kind of theocratic state given all the heavy emphasis on religion. Newspaper articles detail how God supposedly told evangelist Pat Robertson that the Iraq war would entail heavy casualties. Bush supporters testify that they believe that through Bush, "God is in the White House." There is an open disdain for facts and reality. A New York Times Magazine (17 October) article by Ron Suskind describes how a senior Bush advisor told Suskind that "guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That's not the way the world really works anymore'."

Suskind points out that Bush does not have to claim that he is ordained by God; others do it for him. He quotes zealous Bush supporter Hardy Billington declaring, "God gave us this president to be the man to protect the nation at this time."

"We may be that generation that sees Armageddon," Ronald Reagan infamously remarked. Though Reagan was probably thinking of a nuclear showdown with the Soviet Union, today many religious fundamentalist leaders are predicating their positions on the Near East, particularly Israel/Palestine, on a desire for an apocalyptic battle of titanic proportions in the region. This has led to an unholy alliance between the Zionist neocons and the largely Protestant fundamentalist right in the U.S. The two groups have drawn together in spite of the anti-Semitism of the bible-thumpers—Pat Robertson, for example, an ardent supporter of Israel, assigns Jews a role in his imagined conspiracy spelled out in his book The New World Order that reminds one of the lies in the anti-Semitic screed The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

These Christian fundamentalists want to see Armageddon, even if it means nuclear war in the Near East; they want to see the "Second Coming" and the end of the world. And they know to play on the deep religiosity that pervades this country, where, according to a recent Gallup Poll, some 42 percent of Americans describe themselves as "born again" or evangelical Christians. It is not an accident that gay marriage is blown up into some huge supposed threat to civilization as we know it, pushing the ever-popular hot buttons of American religious mania and sexual hysteria.

The fanatical religiosity of the Bush administration, its war-crazed policies, its supreme imperial arrogance and its attacks on the rights of labor and black people have produced a sharp polarization in this country. "When it comes to policy," the New York Times (26 October) noted, Bush "has done more than any president in recent history to advance the agenda of Christian social conservatives. On domestic issues, he has opposed same-sex marriage, favored restrictions on abortion and imposed limits on embryonic stem cell research. He has promoted vouchers for religious schools and shifted money for sex education and reproductive health programs to those that instead promote abstinence." The Bush administration is certainly a pack of crazed woman-hating, anti-black, anti-gay bigots.

It is understandable that many would see Kerry as some kind of "lesser evil" to the Bush gang—it's not so much that people are voting for Kerry but that they're voting against Bush. But from the standpoint of the interests of the working class, black people and the oppressed, the capitalist Democratic Party of John Forbes Kerry (who if elected will be the third-richest president in history) is no alternative. Kerry just wants to better and more rationally (for the capitalists) administer American imperialism abroad and repression at home to further the exploitation of working people for capitalist profit. Although basing their electoral support on different sectors of the population—which can often be very hostile to each other—both Republicans and Democrats at bottom are, as Gore Vidal puts it, "two right wings" of one party, the "Property Party."

Kerry wants to "win" in Iraq, projecting that troops may stay four more years. He supports Israel's concentration-camp walls going up around Palestinian communities. He wants to wage a more effective "war on terror" at home, which would mean more repression of immigrants, black people and labor. And, whatever his personal beliefs, he has not shied away from pandering to the religious vote. The New York Times (25 October) notes: "Mr. Kerry demonstrated a wide liturgical reach, quoting from Matthew, James, John, Luke, the Ten Commandments and ‘Amazing Grace' before recalling for cheering Jews in Boca Raton how he once shouted ‘the Israeli people lives' in Hebrew atop Masada."

It is a measure of how loathsome the Bush regime is that Kerry—a man who voted for the war in Iraq, a man who wants to increase American troop strength by 40,000 men, a man who voted for the USA-Patriot Act—is seen as an alternative. The problem, though, is fundamentally not one of individual candidates but of a capitalist system based on exploitation and profit. On the question of religion, for example, we fight for the strict separation of church and state; religion should be a private matter and we oppose any intrusion by the government into people's personal lives; we call for free abortion on demand; we defend the right of gay people to marry. But under capitalism religion serves a purpose for the rulers; it is a means to enforce social conservatism and defend the existing status quo.

It is said that whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad; and here Bush has a considerable head start. Bush and his cohorts have simply proposed that "America the Good" will dominate planet Earth. This is quite mad and dangerous even as a fantasy. But to be sure, the motor force that drives such aspirations is not insanity but the raison d'être of the imperialist system, which is based on the drive to control the world's markets and sources of raw materials and cheap labor. This drive has intensified exponentially with the capitalist counterrevolution in the Soviet degenerated workers state in 1991-92—a historic defeat for the world's proletariat. The Messianic and oddly demented policies of the Bush regime represent the logic of a capitalist class drunk on one success after another since the end of the Cold War. The U.S. is not only an imperialist power; it is the world's most powerful imperialist power.

There is an irreconcilable antagonism between the interests of the property-owning bosses who exploit workers to obtain profits, and the workers themselves, who own nothing but their labor power and who create the wealth of society. Workers need their own party, which will fight not only for the interests of labor but for the rights of black people, women, gays and all the exploited and oppressed; a workers party that will fight to overturn capitalism, creating a workers government and a society based on production for human needs.

What's the Matter with Kansas?

In our review of Fahrenheit 9/11 (WV No. 829, 9 July), we noted that Michael Moore's "populist outlook leads him to ignore the Bush administration's close ties to the Christian right, to take notice of which would mean acknowledging that Bush really has a popular base. The box office figures of The Passion of the Christ, remember, are real." It is a measure of the deep religiosity of this country that the biggest "cultural" phenomenon in the U.S. in 2004 was Mel Gibson's film—with all its anti-Semitic overtones —which earned over $370 million in the box office and sold over four million copies in its first day out on DVD.

In a recent book titled, What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America (Metropolitan Books, 2004), liberal Thomas Frank attempts to grapple with the resurgence of far-right religious fundamentalism as a major political force and with the apparently baffling lack of even elementary class consciousness among many blue-collar workers. While he reverses cause and effect, tending to see ideology as determining the lack of class struggle, and thinks the Democrats can be a solution, his "heartland" scream of outrage still captures something of the reactionary mess we're in today:

"The country seems more like a panorama of madness and delusion worthy of Hieronymous Bosch: of sturdy blue-collar patriots reciting the Pledge while they strangle their own life chances; of small farmers proudly voting themselves off the land; of devoted family men carefully seeing to it that their children will never be able to afford college or proper health care; of working-class guys in Midwestern cities cheering as they deliver up a landslide for a candidate whose policies will end their way of life, will transform their region into a ‘rust belt,' will strike people like them blows from which they will never recover."

Earlier on, Frank complained:

"The trick never ages; the illusion never wears off. Vote to stop abortion; receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors; receive electricity deregulation. Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meatpacking. Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization. Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining."

What Frank describes may be more intense today, but this is how the capitalist politicians always work—they lie, cheat and steal.

Frank cites a pamphlet, Is It a Sin for a Christian to Be a Registered Democrat Voter in America Today? by a Wichita, Kansas, Christian and Republican ideologue. In fact, the growth of religion in mainstream politics in recent decades did not begin with the Republicans. It began with the Democratic Carter administration. And, like every rightward shift in this country, it was tied to a rise in racist reaction against black people.

The nomination of "born-again" Baptist Carter to head the Democratic Party ticket in the 1976 elections was not accidental. Carter openly proclaimed the virtues of "ethnic purity." Busing for school integration, having been defeated on the streets of Boston in 1974-75, was killed in city after city. Five leftist anti-racist militants in Greensboro, North Carolina, were gunned down in broad daylight in 1979 by a group of Klansmen and Nazis led by an "informer" for the Feds.

Coming to power just after the defeat of U.S. imperialism by the heroic Vietnamese workers and peasants, the Carter administration kicked off a "moral" rearmament campaign—an onslaught of domestic social reaction and anti-Communist "human rights" campaign against the Soviet degenerated workers state. These policies reflected a consensus within the American ruling class, which sought to overcome widespread public mistrust of the government following the Watergate events that forced the resignation of Republican president Richard Nixon in 1974, and to refurbish the tarnished credentials and military might of U.S. imperialism after Vietnam.

The religious right provided the shock troops for the right-wing backlash against the limited gains made by women and black people in the 1960s and early '70s—what the likes of the clerical Catholic reactionary Patrick Buchanan call the "Culture War." The religious right mobilized not only against the gains but against the defiance of the racist status quo shown by those who struggled.

With the election of Reagan, both the assaults on black rights and the Cold War against the Soviet Union intensified. Reagan expanded the clandestine CIA operation launched by Carter to fund Islamic reactionaries in Afghanistan, turning it into the biggest covert operation by the CIA in American history. At home, Reagan's assaults on labor were exemplified by the 1981 smashing of the PATCO air traffic controllers union—using plans drawn up by the Carter administration. The fostering of religious reaction during the 1980s was so great that by the 1988 elections, Bush Sr., who was not an evangelical Christian, won the White House largely on the basis of the evangelical vote.

The fact that Bill Clinton associated with blacks and actually had black friends has endeared him to many black people—a measure of the deep racial divide in this country. But the very selection of the Clinton/Gore ticket in 1992—two white Southerners—was designed to win back the White House through a campaign of appealing to the Southern, white racist vote. This was symbolized during the 1992 campaign by Clinton flying back to Arkansas to oversee the execution of a brain-damaged black man, Ricky Ray Rector.

Clinton promised to "end welfare as we know it"—and, in fact, accomplishing what his Republican predecessors could not do, actually did it. Clinton presided over a vast expansion of the death penalty and prison system, creating a huge national grid of cages for an unprecedented growth in the disproportionately black and minority prison population. The U.S. today has more people in prison, as a percent of total population, than any other country. In Iraq Clinton's policies killed far more men, women and children during the United Nations-sponsored starvation "sanctions" blockade and bloody bombing campaigns than Bush's invasion and occupation so far.

Both parties have shifted to the right, bringing reactionary social layers to political ascendancy. The fundamentalist Christian right is today mainstream, and provides a cover for the fascist fringe that terrorizes black people and guns down abortion doctors. As a political force, Christian fundamentalism represents backwardness and social reaction. It's anti-science, anti-evolution and pro-creationism. It's for prayer in public schools and the subjugation of women and children in the family: the antithesis of the values of the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991-92, religious reaction in the U.S. grew, along with increasing attacks on the rights of workers, minorities and women. The removal of the USSR as the main enemy of U.S. imperialism has also meant that U.S. imperialism had to find a new enemy, which eventually, particularly following the September 11 attacks, became Islamic fundamentalism. The very fact that the line drawn in international politics is currently defined by a war against Islamic fundamentalism has served to galvanize Christian fundamentalism in the U.S. Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a treasury official for Bush Sr., told Suskind in the Times Magazine article that the Christian fundamentalist Bush "is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy" because he has a "Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do." Bartlett continued, "He understands them, because he's just like them." Indeed, Al Qaeda is Osama bin Laden's own "faith based" initiative, as well as a Frankenstein's monster that turned on its erstwhile masters.

For a Workers Party!

In the U.S., black people are always a central target of the very same forces that mobilize in opposition to abortion rights, gay marriage and any expression of social liberalization. This underlines that it is in the interest of black people to fight for the rights of gays, women and all the oppressed.

Because they are victims of unrelenting racial oppression, many black people sympathize with the struggles of other oppressed sectors of the population. But religiosity among black people also leaves them open to backward views on issues like abortion and gay marriage. A recent survey, for example, noted that support for Bush has increased among older, more conservative black people. In our article, "For the Right to Gay Marriage!" (WV No. 821, 5 March), we quoted a black Baptist minister who said, "If the K.K.K. opposes gay marriage, I would ride with them." But as we wrote in response, the minister "might saddle up, but it will be a short ride—the first target of this motley collection of nativist, anti-labor fascists is black people."

From the days of slavery to the present, the oppression of black people has been a fundamental feature of American capitalism. Black people are both segregated at the bottom of American society and integrated into the economy. If it is to fight for its own emancipation, the multiracial proletariat must take up the struggle for black freedom. The working class will transcend its divisions only through class and social struggle. Only by the common struggle of the multiracial working class under the leadership of a revolutionary workers party will a socialist revolution be made.

The working class needs such a party; but the primary obstacle to working-class unity in the U.S. has been the deep racial divide fostered by the American ruling class, which has served to retard the political consciousness of the working class. In this, the bourgeoisie is aided by the AFL-CIO tops, who do their best to corral the labor movement behind capitalist politicians, particularly Democrats, and the black politicians and preachers, who also do their utmost for the Democrats. At bottom, their message is deeply demoralizing: the best that workers, women and black people can do is vote once every four years for some cynical capitalist politician and then hope he won't kick them around too much once he gets into office. A workers party will be forged only through class and social struggle independent of the capitalist parties.

The absence of such struggle helps account for the remarkable phenomenon that Thomas Frank eloquently documents in What's the Matter with Kansas? With not much of a leftist movement in the U.S., the religious right has created a thoroughly bogus "class" argument against the "liberal elites." "Class" gets posed in the eyes of many in thrall to the toxic communion of the religious right not as bosses versus workers, but as the godly regular folks against the decadent, left-of-center, latté-drinking heathens who haunt art galleries in New York and Los Angeles.

The rise of religiosity in this country, particularly among working people, is directly related to the fact that most people in the U.S. can scarcely perceive a way to fight against the oppression and exploitation they suffer. (Frank, for example, notes that McPherson, Nebraska, the poorest county in the country, is solidly Republican.) As we wrote in "Marxism and Religion" (reprinted in the Spartacist pamphlet, Enlightenment Rationalism and the Origins of Marxism), modern religion is "a means both of oppression and of escape for the oppressed." Noting that "Man makes religion, religion does not make man," Karl Marx explained:

"Religious suffering is at one and the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

"The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions."

— "Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right" (1844)

We need to fight for a world of such material abundance that people won't need religion to make up for what they lack. And that is only possible through the overthrow of the capitalist order and the forging of a new socialist society that will open a new period of human development and lay the basis for the expansion of human freedom in all spheres. All the more necessary then, if humanity is to have any kind of future, to fight for what we want in this world. And the starting point for that is a break with the Democratic Party and a fight to build a workers party that will fight for socialist revolution.