The Republican Right's challenge to the global antiwar movement
Walden Bello
BusinessWorld
November 9, 2004

   There continue to be credible allegations of fraud, particularly
in the vote count in the state of Ohio, but most of the United
States, including the Democratic Party, has recognized that George
W. Bush has been reelected to the presidency with a 3.5 million
margin of victory over John Kerry.

   The terrible truth, however, is that the Republican victory,
while not lopsided, was solid. Another phase of the political
revolution begun by Ronald Reagan in 1980, the 2004 elections
confirmed that the center of gravity of US politics lies not on the
center-right but on the extreme right. Now, it remains true that the
country is divided almost evenly, and bitterly so. But it is the
Republican Right that has managed to provide a compelling vision for
its base and to fashion and implement a strategy to win power at all
levels of the electoral arena, in civil society, and in the media.
While liberals and progressives have floundered, the Radical Right
has united under an utterly simple vision the different components
of its base: the South and Southwest, the majority of white males,
the upper and middle classes that have benefited from the neoliberal
economic revolution, Corporate America, and Christian
fundamentalists. This vision is essentially a subliminal one, and it
is that of a country weakened from within by an alliance of pro-big
government liberals, promiscuous gays and lesbians, and illegal
immigrants, and besieged from without by hateful Third World hordes
and effete Europeans jealous of America's prosperity and power.

   There are, indeed, two Americas, but one is confused and
disorganized while the other exudes a confidence and arrogance that
only superior strategy and organization can bestow. The Radical
Right has managed, with its vision of a return to an imagined
community - a pristine white Christian small-town America circa 1950
- to construct what the Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci called a
"hegemonic bloc." And this bloc is poised to continue its reign for
the next 25 years.

   The future of democracy, economic rights, individual rights, and
minority rights seems bleak in the US, but it is perhaps only
through a second shock therapy - the first being Reagan's victory in
1980 - that progressive America will finally confront what it will
take to turn the tide: an all-sided battle for ideological and
organizational hegemony in which it must expect no quarter and it
must give none, where it can no longer afford to make mistakes.

   But while America marches rightward, it fails to drag the rest of
the world along with it. Indeed, most of the rest of the world is
headed in the opposite direction. Nothing illustrated this more than
the fact that in the very week Bush was reelected, a coalition of
left parties came to power in Uruguay, Hugo Chavez, Washington's new
nemesis in Latin America, swept state elections in Venezuela, and
Hungary served notice it was withdrawing its 300 troops from Iraq.
Although the American Right is consolidating its hold domestically,
it cannot halt the unraveling of Washington's hegemony globally.

   The principal cause of what we have called the crisis of
overextension, or the mismatch between goals and resources owing to
imperial ambition, is the massive miscalculation of invading Iraq.
This crisis is likely to continue, if not accelerate, in Bush's
second term. The key manifestations of the imperial dilemma stand