“Senator McCain was the candidate most associated with the surge,” declared Giuliani, who attacked the Democrats for having “given up on Iraq.” And, Giuliani continued, “ladies and gentlemen, when they gave up on Iraq, they had given up on America.”
Giuliani, who invokes 9/11 every time he speaks, lashed out at “the left-wing media” and the “Hollywood celebrities.” He skewered Obama for his “Ivy League education” (never mind that Bush went to Yale) and his background as a community organizer. And the former Mayor of New York City lashed out at those who think the small Alaska town that Sarah Palin came from “isn’t cosmopolitan enough.”
Palin saluted McCain as the man who “refused to break faith with those troops in Iraq who now have brought victory within sight.” And she derided Obama as someone who “can give an entire speech about the wars America is fighting and never use the word ‘victory,’ except when he’s talking about his own campaign.”
The angry “hockey mom,” the self-described “pit bull with lipstick,” also lashed out at the very idea that being a “community organizer” was a legitimate thing. She pandered to and promoted small-town narrow-mindedness, and resentment of any enlightened ideas: “[I]n small towns, we don’t quite know what to make of a candidate who lavishes praise on working people when they’re listening and then talks about how bitterly they cling to their religion and guns when those people aren’t listening. No, we tend to prefer candidates who don’t talk about us one way in Scranton and another way in San Francisco.”
Both speeches had the smug, bullying tone of an episode of the O’Reilly Factor on Fox—lashing out at the “cosmopolitans,” the “Hollywood liberals,” those who are concerned about whether detainees get “read…their rights.”
When Adolf Hitler rallied the angry “volk”—the “common people” in Germany—against the “cosmopolitans”—(which in Germany, at that time, took extreme concentration in his attacks on the Jews)—it was called fascism.
What do you call it in the USA?
McCain’s Message of Sacrifice for EmpireWhile Palin and Giuliani provided the drama and dynamism at the RNC, McCain’s speech concentrated a key element of the Republicans' message. It might have appeared that the finale of McCain’s speech was simply one more self-serving installment of his endlessly invoked experience as a prisoner of war (McCain was shot down while flying high above Vietnam, part of an air war that contributed to killing millions of Vietnamese people in the Vietnam war). But there was a specific message here, concentrated in McCain’s self-described evolution from someone who “didn’t think there was a cause that was more important than me,” to someone who learned to “fight again for my country….” Someone who “fell in love with my country”—and, he pointedly added, “not just for the many comforts of life here.”
McCain’s speech was a call to rally around and fight for traditional American values, even through hard times, military challenges, and personal sacrifice. And it converged with the elevated role of the Christian fascists, who provide a coherent morality and organization for just such mobilization.
Bushism without BushBarack Obama has positioned himself as the candidate to “bring us together.” And there are ruling class voices arguing that Obama would be the best possible “face” on all the things that will have to be done in the service of American empire. As Revolution analyzed last week: “Obama would not rule in precisely the same way as McCain. That is not our point. What IS essential is that he would serve the same fundamental interests, and obey the same fundamental imperatives, as McCain. In line with that, Obama is also making the case to these rulers that his particular mix of aggression and negotiations, combined with his ability to ‘appeal to’ people internationally and pacify the political scene at home, would be more effective than that of McCain in serving those interests and imperatives.”
Obama and McCain do not differ over the basic direction of society. Nor do their differences arise in any fundamental way from competing “interest groups” that tend to be aligned with the Republicans or the Democrats. The sharply contending programs they are bringing forward both start from the overall interests of U.S. imperialism. They both agree on the terms set by the so-called “war on terror,” with all the terrible suffering and death that is bringing to the world. But the differences they do have represent contending forces and agendas within the ruling class over how to navigate through the minefield of contradictions confronting the U.S. rulers. Through the RNC, the Republicans, with their slogan “Country First,” put forward their solution to reforging national unity and charging forward globally in troubled times.
Bush himself was hardly mentioned and only spoke to the convention by video, where he himself promoted McCain as an “independent” agent of change. The fact that the RNC had to go to great lengths to distance the Republican Party and McCain (who, after all, are the dominant force in the “status quo” right now) from Bush reveals the sense among the ruling class of how deep and wide is the anger at Bush and the sharpness of the challenges they face in the period ahead.
In the face of real centrifugal pulls tearing U.S. society apart, and real global challenges to the U.S. empire, the message from the RNC was an unapologetic appeal to traditional “small-town” American values—ignorant arrogance, intolerance, hyperpatriotism, and old time religion. The Republicans maneuvered to trump Obama’s calls for “change” with their own version of “change”: a reactionary populist rebellion against the “elite,” the “Washington insiders,” and the “mainstream media,” led by a supposed maverick senator and a crusading, anti-insider hockey mom from Alaska. Representative Marsha Blackburn pretty much summed it up when she told the crowd, “We are the gun totin’, God fearin,’ flag wavin’ Americans who are excited to see two crack shots on the ticket with the status quo in their sights.”
This message from the RNC was ominous. It was a call to the faithful to rally behind, and be ready to sacrifice for, the USA in its global wars for empire. It whipped up a section of society to support domestic repression and tough out and blame people with less for economic hard times already here and down the road. And the undertones and overtones in all this represented a continuation of the outlook of the Bushites: that they represent the only legitimate path for this country, and that any opposition to what they are doing, and how they are doing it—even from other ruling class forces who share their basic outlook but differ on approaches—is unacceptable and illegitimate.
The RNC presented a message of Bushism without Bush. Still here was the openly aggressive, “go it alone” if necessary foreign policy in service of empire; heavy on force, and at least publicly disdainful of diplomacy. And still here but ramped up, a promise of a powerful place at the White House table and throughout society for Christian fascists. What was new was the populist edge, foreshadowed by the Huckabee candidacy, and a call to “suck it up,” like McCain did in a Vietnamese prison, and put the country ahead of personal comforts.
In addition to what happened inside the convention, the extreme, fascistic repression against dissenters and the attacks on independent and even mainstream reporters unleashed in St. Paul in the period up to and outside the convention, were another dimension to the message from the RNC—the intolerance of opposition, dissent, or even uncomfortable questions (see "The RNC’S Outrageous Assault on Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!, and Alternative Media...This is What Imperialist Democracy Looks Like" at revcom.us.
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