War, Sex and Impeachment

a commentary by Richard Greeman

Millions of gallons of ink have been spilled condemning or defending Bill Clinton’s personality or speculating about the outcome of his various trials, but there has been precious little analysis of the underlying political and social significance – if any – of this unprecedented spectacle which presents itself as a jumble of paradoxes.

The mutually assured destruction (MAD) of both political parties undermines the hegemony of the political class, and this is a Good Thing. But of course "what happens after" is the killer, and that depends on the masses. However, the processes of clearing away the lies, the junk, the hypocrisy goes a long way toward the necessary clearing of heads that must proceed the next cognitive leap. For the moment, I can only cheer at the self-destruction of the ruling classes' institutions at the very time when the world economy is tottering on the brink of collapse. This MAY be that "one chance in a thousand" for humanity to save itself. There is no doubt in my mind that the US imperial government represents the biggest threat to freedom and the survival in the world. To see it brought down by its own corruption, decadance, and inability to rise to its historic mission gives great satisfaction and opens a door to possibilities as yet unimagined. Meanwhile, our first task is to analyse this constitutional battle of titans fought by Lilliputians and try to understand its import.

How indeed to account for the paradoxical situation where the entire corrupt political class and scandal-mongering mainstream media are unanimous in moralistic condemnation fo the president while the majority of (churchgoing) Americans express passive "approval" and grudging sympanthy for Clinton? Why this Right-wing, Dixie-based vendetta against a right-to-work Southern president whose record is the most conservative in the century? What is behind the paradox of a hypocritical, fanatically Puritanical witch-hunt prosecuted by sexist, racist "good ol’ Boys" before a bored audience of mostly tolerant, sexually sophisticated Americans while the rest of the world looks on with stunned incomprehension?…

The only logical explanation for this political implosion is that the owning class in the US has achieved such total hegemony over economic, political, and military power that it is indifferent to what happens in the sphere of government. This thesis is born out by the amazing fact that Wall Street gained 20 points on the Dow the very day the President was impeached in the midst of a shooting war with bombs raining down on Iraq. Indeed, the reason that this historical crisis is breaking out over the basically trivial issue of a few intimate kisses between consenting adults stolen behind an office door is that there no longer are any serious issues dividing the US political class. Rather, there is a solid consensus among Republicans, Democrats, and the pundits around the neo-liberal corporate agenda of promoting globalization, reducing labor costs in the name of competition, etc., etc… Meanwhile the real needs of the poor, the minorities, women, the working people, queers, the issues of health, education, and the environment are barely a blip on the Establishment’s radar. However, within today’s corporate-media consensus, there can be no real debate, only posturing and name-calling. Since the Clintonites and the Republicans are competing for the same corporate campaign contributions and the same narrow band of white middle-class voters, politics is reduced to personalities and media-images…

The fact that both sides are trapped in their hypocrisy over private sexual morality (the ONLY "morality" that capitalism recognizes) is itself significant. It is first of all symptomatic of the drift in US politics toward "social (sic) issues" (defined as private morality) initiated by the Christian (sic) Right and slavishly submitted to by the Dems and Liberal Republicans. This carefully crafted rightwing campaign has succeeded in pushing real social and politcal issues -- like poverty, exploitation, racism, oppression of women ans queers, pollution, the drift toward a police state, monolithic US imperialist interventionism -- practically off the agenda. But now the initiators are caught in their own hypocritical and moralistic logic. The more the pots call the kettles black, the more disillusioned and disgusted the people become. And the media, who thrive on commercialized sex and violence while hypocritically joining the pack baying at Clinton's heels, are also -- thank Goddess! -- discrediting themselves at the very moment when they have become monolithic.

The fact that this national political crisis focuses on private sexual morality is also significant from the point of view of our anti-patriarchal analysis of capitalism and our belief that the transformation of society must begin with individual and sexual liberation. We see throughout the world how rabid, rightwing religious fanaticism and retrogressionist patriarchies are using the wedge of sexual morality to tighten the grip of the state on civil society. The constitutional crisis in Malaysia, for example, patterned on Monicagate, is framed as an anti-gay witchunt rather than a clash between nationalistic and globalist elements in the local bourgeoisie. And everywhere, from Algeria and Afganistan to Israel, Indonesia, ex-Yugoslavia and the Congo the forces of capitalist reaction systematically use the oppression of women and the suppression of consensual sexual activity (including even choice in marriage-partners) as a weapon in their struggle for total hegemony to the point where the state-sponsored mass rape of women has become a common instrument of policy. This is expressed as a common front of bellicose anti-woman, anti-sex, anti-queer fanaticism which differs only in form from the Ahyatollas, the Taliban, the Grand Rabbis of Jerusalem, the Hindu warmongers to the Pope and the Christian Right in Congress. This means that every human who wishes to express her/his sexuality becomes ipso facto an enemy of the state. On the one hand, this massive sexual repression disarms, divides, degrades and demoralizes popular movements. On the other, it creates every self-respecting individual as an enemy of the state.

I see this retrogression as an attempt to undo the sexual revolution which was part of the generalized social revolutionary tendencies of the 1960's and 1970's. But it cannot really succeed in bringing back the Middle Ages because the cat is already out to the bag and people know there are other ways to live their sexuality. Indeed, in the global village of satelite TV and the Net, even the degraded and commercialized images of "free" sex have the positive virtue of reminding people that there are OTHER paths than repression.

This is especially true in the US. Contrary to the strategy of the Christian Right and to the received wisdom here and in Europe, I am convinced that the huge majority of the people of the United States (including church-going Christians) are not really puritanical in the conventional sense. Just listen to the country music aimed at the rural and working people of the Heartland which explores all the issues of "adultery," jealousy, lonliness and the search for sexual love in the most down-to-earth, realistic, commonsensical terms. Just listen to the Clinton jokes in the office, on the Net. Just look at the polls. The Republican Right has painted itself into a corner on this one, while Clinton and the hypocritical Democrats have thought of nothing better than to join them in that corner. Hooray and a plague on both their houses. In their attempt to compete for a few swing votes among mainly white conservative Christians, the Republocrats have isolated themselves from the vast majority of American men and women -- particularly the latter. Everyone wants to "move on" -- but to what? Business as usual or revolution? That remains to be seen.

As a result of this bi-partisan focus on "social" (private sexual) issues, the rich have had a 20 year field day scuttling all the social programs initiated during the last Great Depression and removing the social safety net from under the poor and working people as if in preparation for the coming Great Depression. The next Crash will cause incredible suffering among the poor in the US and all countries, and the working and unemployed will have no choice but to organize and resist in a fight for survival. The reformist channels that would normally re-cycle their anger back into the system have been destroyed to the extent that whatever comes next will be vast and spontaneous. The historic facts of the globalization of the economy, the dismantling of the welfare state and the near-total discrediting of the two-party system mean that this struggle will take place on new historical grounds. Of course one cannot exclude the development of homegrown fascism supported by the rabid Right in the government and the other institutions of the state (police, prisons, etc.) Nor can we exclude some sort of insider "coup" (naturally within the Constitution as interpreted by a judiciary packed with 30 years worth of right-wing appointees). Indeed, nothing can be excluded in this historically new situation, which is another way of saying "tout est possible" ("everything is possible" -- the slogan of 1936 and 1968 in France).

But sex is just one aspect of this battle of titans carried out by Lilliputians, because the major issue posed here is the historically important Constitutional one. It first arose during the Nixon impeachment crisis (which was also argued in terms of technicalities around a 3rd rate bungled burglary). The basic issue is that of the Imperial Presidency, the fantastic buildup in the modern war-state of power of the Executive to the detriment of the other two branches of government (Legislative, Judiciary). The overgrowth of the Executive begins in the Depression with the Rooseveltian welfare state and economic interventionism to save capitalism (tendency toward US state-capitalism) and continues right through WWI with massive arms buildup. The post-war recession is "solved" by the Cold War and permanant war economy, thus reinforcing state-capitalist tendencies and Executive power, the most awesome of which is the warmaking power, which the Constitution gives to Congress and Congress alone. Yet the two major wars fought by the US in the second half of the 20th Centry (the Korean "police action" and the Vietnamese affair) were never declared by Congress, and what with US intervention in Iran and Guatamala (1954), the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Grenada, the covert Central American wars of the 80's followed by Panama and Desert Storm, Americans have become so used to the President intervening militarily without consulting Congress that few seem to even notice this "little" fact. Nonetheless, the issue was very much alive in the Nixon impeachment, which was mainly about "Executive Privilege" as well as in the Reagan-Bush Iran-Contra scandal.

The Special Council was created to right that imbalance, but obviously it got out of hand, proof that today's decadant ruling class should know better than to fiddle with the most perfect, conservative, bourgeois-democratic Constitution ever devised by man. The US Constitution embodies all the traditional wisdom of the British unwritten constitution as it evolved through the Civil Wars of the 17th Century which ended in class compromise. It also embodies the best of French Enlightment thinking (Rousseau but especially Montesquieu) as interpreted by a splendid generation of seasoned revolutionaries who had just defeated the world's greatest power in the War of Independance -- Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, Adams and Co. This Constitution (which only grudgingly incorporated the popular Bill of Rights) was so solid that it withstood a second American revolution, the Civil War, which resulted in the anti-slavery Ammendments. Today, it is clearly at risk.

The serious question that follows is what other kind of politics can emerge from its irrelevant orgy of self-destructive idiocy? To this we will return later…

Richard Greeman can be reached through the Victor Serge Foundation at

E-mail: victorserge@igc.org.

Email Queer Notions: qnotions@graphicgirlz.com