The Bush Cabal and the specter of fascism.

• Author: Farber, Seth
• Position: Politics and Election

There is a heated debate in the Green Party. Should Ralph Nader run in the 2004 Presidential elections? If Nader declines to run should the Greens run another high-profile candidate? Should the Greens adopt a "safe states" strategy and avoid "taking away" potentially critical electoral votes from the Democratic candidate? Several months ago, The Nation (December 2, 2002) published a front page article by journalist and former Green Party activist Ronnie Dugger in which, invoking the threat of a second term for Bush, he exhorted his friend, "Ralph, Don't Run!" Dugger further urged Green activists to abandon third party politics, and work for change within the Democratic Party.

At the other end of the Green spectrum Howie Hawkins, a founder of the Green Party, has consistently argued that the policies of Bush are virtually identical to that of Clinton and of most of the Democrats who have preceded him, and that therefore Greens should not be concerned with whether Bush is or is not reelected (or elected rather).

Most of those who believe, like Hawkins, that it does not matter whether Bush gets in again argue that there are no essential differences between the Democrats and the Republicans and that had Clinton or Gore been in office both their foreign policy and domestic repression agendas would have been almost identical to that of Bush. Is this true? Is Bush no more malignant or dangerous than his predecessors?

I think this is a dangerous exaggeration that derives its prima facie plausibility from the moral equivalence of the Democrats and Republicans when judged by a higher standard of ethics which conflicts with the system-logic of corporate capitalism. For example, although Clinton did not initiate an actual war to remove Saddam, he defended, and did not hesitate to continue, the unconscionable policy of economic sanctions that resulted (according to UNICEF) in the death of 1/2 million Iraqi children between 1992-1998.

Clinton, as president, was an amoral servant of corporate power. Unlike Bush, however, he was not a fanatic. Bush and his closest advisers, the architects of his foreign policy, are out of their minds. The return to office in 2005 of Bush and his "cabal" of deranged neo-conservative ideologues might very well result in the transformation of the United States into a totalitarian country. The US government is already operating a concentration camp at Guantanamo for immigrants deemed terrorist suspects by the Bush junta, and detained without due process under the authority of the PATRIOT Act.

The PATRIOT Act II...