Lessons of the Alabama election
14 December 2017
Media pundits and Democratic Party leaders are hailing the outcome of the special election in Alabama to fill a seat in the US Senate—with Democrat Doug Jones narrowly defeating the ultra-right Republican Roy Moore—as a political “miracle.”
“Thank you, Alabama,” gushed the Washington Post, for choosing “to spare the nation the indignity of seating an accused child molester in the U.S. Senate.” The editorial concluded: “Thanks to Alabama, Americans can wake up Wednesday morning feeling hopeful about the decency and dignity of their democracy.”
The New York Times sounded the same theme, headlining its editorial, “Roy Moore Loses, Sanity Reigns,” and hailing a “triumph for decency and common sense in a state that seemed for a time at risk of abandoning both…” Referring to the right-wing Democrat who defeated Moore, the Times declared that Alabamians had been correct in “choosing a candidate whose record was cause for pride, not shame, one who spent his career battling bigotry, not exploiting it.”
The spreading of editorial rose petals over the Alabama result should fool no one. A right-wing Democrat, operating with a nearly 10-1 financial advantage, has eked out a victory over a fascistic candidate, not by confronting and opposing Moore’s ultra-right pronouncements, let alone offering an alternative to defend working people. Instead, Jones owes his razor-thin margin to the unleashing over the past month of a barrage of allegations of sexual misconduct by Moore….
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…The Trump administration is deeply unpopular, the Republican Congress even more so. There has been a significant shift to the left in public opinion. But within the framework of capitalist politics, mass hostility to Trump has led to the election of right-wing Democrats: in the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial elections last month, the victory of a former Goldman Sachs banker and a conservative lieutenant governor who voted twice for George W. Bush; and now in the Alabama Senate race, the victory of Doug Jones, who ran as a law-and-order candidate and pledges to work with right-wing Republican Senator Richard Shelby and seek “common ground” with the Trump White House.
The last week of the Alabama election campaign coincided with the visit to that state by the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, who went to rural areas of the state where conditions are so abominable, in terms of water and sewage infrastructure, primitive housing, and poverty, that he said he had never seen as bad in any industrialized country.
These conditions are the joint responsibility of the two right-wing parties that hold all political offices in the United States and control local, state and national government. Living standards and social conditions continue to deteriorate under Democrats and Republicans alike. The working class must draw the necessary political conclusions, and take the road of independent political struggle against the capitalist system, building a new mass political party based on a socialist program.
Patrick Martin
link:http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/12/14/pers-d14.html
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