Workers World, Vol. 22, No. 44
November 5: Those who would snuff out a fire by fanning its flames run the risk of being consumed in the process. The Carter administration, practically since the day Carter was inaugurated back in January 1977, has been consistently feeding blatant reaction at home and unbridled militarism abroad.
It was Carter’s way of “fighting” a growing ultra-rightist trend which he himself was fully aware of even before he took office. Rather than really fighting it, however, he attempted to steal its thunder.
Thus, his entire 1976 election campaign was filled with hypocritical diatribes and the most disgusting demagogy about fighting “big government” and “Washington” in particular. Some of the same demagogy used in the Nixon-Agnew election campaign was thus appropriated by Carter who also inveighed against the “big wheels” in the Washington establishment and particularly the federal bureaucracy.
Nothing, however, that Carter did during his tenure in office in any degree propitiated or mollified the rightward swing of the ruling class and its effort to put an end to the era of rising expectations and significant economic and political reforms. These reforms were won by the tremendous, militant upsurge of the working class on the heels of the great economic collapse in 1929 and the ushering in of the Roosevelt era.
Appeasement of the menacing forces which would ultimately undo him characterizes the entire period of Carter’s administration. Having lied to the masses from the very beginning that he would reduce so-called defense expenditures, he quickly embarked upon a tremendously expanded war budget. Nevertheless, the admirals and generals, and the military-industrial complex with which they are all allied, never felt it was enough.
The militarists wildly applauded Carter’s State of the Union message last year in which he in effect abandoned SALT II and called for military superiority and unveiled a more threatening economic austerity program than the one he had pursued for almost three years. But nothing availed.
The military, the bankers, and the industrialists ungraciously took from the Carter administration giant, extortionate giveaways such as the deregulation of oil prices and enormous tax concessions. Nevertheless, they continued to blame him for the disastrous state of the economy of which they themselves were the architects.
To the very end they squeezed the Carter administration for every economic and political concession they could get, leaving him discredited with the very coalition of forces which elected him – the workers, Black, Latin and other oppressed peoples, and the poor in general. Nor did they shrink from inciting, if not virtually fully financing, a broader and broader opposition from the Republican right and its tail of extreme racists, Klansmen, Birchers, fanatical right-to-lifers, etc.
Having embraced the reactionary economic doctrine fashioned by Wall Street’s Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker and Secretary of the Treasury G. William Miller of fighting (if that’s what it can be called) inflation by increasing unemployment, Carter could not possibly avoid the wrath of both the workers and the middle class. Both suffered from the twin diseases which are the product of the decay of the capitalist system.
The resulting disillusionment of the broad masses could be easily anticipated, if not on the basis of economic theory, then certainly on the basis of contemporary practical experience in other parts of the capitalist world that should be familiar to Carter and his economic and political advisors.
The example of how the British Labour Party, and the Callaghan leadership in particular, fared in last year’s election should have served as an object less of what to avoid.
Carter and his cabinet of bankers, industrialists, and their servants are not precisely analogous to Callaghan and his cabinet of British Labour Party ministers. But their approach to the same fundamental phenomenon and the experience it offered should have shown clearly to the Carter administration, and in particular to its liberal and labor supporters, what to expect.
What was the Callaghan program when faced with a severe economic recession, more prolonged, but similar to what was taking place in the U.S.? The Callaghan government, notwithstanding that it was the official and duly elected representative of the working class, embarked upon a program of appeasing and mollifying the capitalist ruling class in Britain by pursuing an economic austerity program similar to what the Carter administration inaugurated.
Callaghan’s economic advisors prescribed a so-called struggle against inflation by increasing unemployment and cutting social services. The disastrous result for the Labour Party in the May 1979 elections could be clearly understood by all on this side of the Atlantic who were concerned with the forthcoming elections in the U.S.
The bankers and financiers in this country took malicious delight in the victory of Thatcherism in Britain and prescribed it as the remedy for the U.S. Moreover, some of the results of Milton Freidman’s economic theories of strangling the working class, which was the remedy applied by the Thatcher Conservative government, were already under fierce attack all over Britain. Unemployment continued to rise, inflation was not reduced, but the misery of the working class increased.
Carter’s attempt to get out of the blind alley in which he and his administrators found themselves by suddenly embarking upon a peace-mongering campaign after engaging in the most odious jingoism, military posturing, and threats of war in the Persian Gulf and against the Soviet Union could not but boomerang.
It merely enabled the Reaganites and Reagan himself in particular to play pacifist and helped to deceive a greater portion of people who were taken in by his new, moderate, and softer tactical peace maneuver.
It was not, however, only Carter and his top advisors, cabinet members, and administrators who pursued a self-defeating policy. Practically the entire group of liberal capitalist politicians who were allied with Carter embarked upon the same disastrous policy of appeasing and mollifying the ultra-rightist forces by attempting to steal their thunder. In the process, they merely strengthened the reactionary rightwing and became their victims.
In was not a sudden development in the tail end of the election campaign. It was a process which dated back months, if not several years. (In fact, the ultra-rightist surge began to take on steam well into the Nixon administration years, fueled by virulent racism. But the ouster of Nixon as a result of the Watergate conspiracy obscured its menacing development.)
The most prominent liberal Democratic politicians found themselves to be the target of a coordinated, ultra-rightist campaign, surreptitiously supported by the military and the oil monopolies, but also aid by “right-to-work” proponents, right-to-lifers, anti-ERA extremists, as well as a motley crew of racists.
Speaking for her husband, Senator Frank Church of Idaho, who is the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a victim of the ultra-rightist attack, Mrs. Church described the character of the struggle they were forced into: “We felt during the course of the [ultra-rightist] campaign that we were like salmon swimming upstream.” Indeed, the analogy may be wholly pertinent.
All the liberal politicians were fighting an uphill battle to which the national Democratic machine and the liberal bourgeoisie as a whole were giving scanty attention and even less support. The capitalist media only took note of it toward the close of the campaign. By no means, however, did they focus in on the rabid and reactionary character of the assaults or attempt to expose the source of the ultra-rightists’ finances and the real instigators – the military, the oil monopolies, and the bankers and industrialists.
Yet, indeed, like salmon fighting their way upstream, the route for survival is not to turn back, as salmon know instinctively. That path leads to disaster from predators. The route for survival is to continue upstream in the quest for new life.
That is not, however, what the likes of a Senator Church preferred to do. Unlike the salmon that survive and multiply in spite of swift currents, rapids, and falls, Church took what he presumed to be the easier and safer course.
What he embarked upon was to clamor about the now temporarily forgotten “Soviet combat brigade” in Cuba which he invented and publicized in an effort to outdo the ultra-right. But he only would up on the beaten path to disaster. His phony campaign about the fictitious Soviet brigade did not endear him to the hearts of the poisonous extremists, as they were subsequently called by Church supporters. He, of course, went down to defeat as did Birch Bayh of Indiana, George McGovern of South Dakota, and others.
What can be learned from all of this?
The ruling class, which ignited the fire in the first place, did not do it out of spite but out of objective necessity. If they are intent upon expanding their adventurist role abroad, if they are to regain their preeminent position economically, diplomatically, and above all militarily, it is necessary to cruelly slash the living standards of the people at home and create a political atmosphere conducive to such purposes. Liberalism as a moderate bourgeois way to administer the capitalist state is hardly suitable for governing harshly over the masses.
For the ruling class, the question was whether to adjust itself to the realities of the world situation, which is undergoing a revolutionary transformation, certainly in the most underdeveloped parts of the planet, or to embark upon a course which ill certainly bring it into collision with the rest of the world. It is a world in which even its closest imperialist allies are shaking loose from its embrace as they sense the dangerous course the U.S. ruling class, particularly its military establishment, is projecting for itself.
In particular its imperialist allies wish to shake loose from the aggressive U.S. monopolies which now feel themselves losing ground in economic competition with their erstwhile partners in Western Europe and Japan.
What then should be the perspective for the masses in the U.S. in the light of the reactionary trend, which from the beginning has been inaugurated, promoted, financed, and organized by the ruling class in a prolonged effort to saturate the masses with it through their media, the press, and the pulpit?
Reactionary electoral victories in the United States, and particularly in Japan and Western Europe, are not uncommon because the ruling class has the instruments both of coercion and ideological dissemination. They can, particularly under circumstances of economic crisis, usher in a temporary period of political reaction.
History demonstrates that reaction in its initial stages may depress, discourage, and frustrate the continuing economic, social, and political struggle of the masses against the ruling class. But this is only so in the initial period which in the contemporary situation of American capitalism can only be of an ephemeral character.
The case would be otherwise if, along with the new rightward surge, a period of economic stability and improvement in the living standard of the masses could ensue. But as even one of the principal representatives of the bourgeoisie, the New York Times, ruefully admits in its congratulatory editorial to Reagan, stability and economic improvement are not in the offing for the incoming Reagan administration.
For the bourgeois liberals, and for elements of the more conservative bourgeois labor bureaucracy, there may not be any other road but supine and cowardly adaptation to the needs of the capitalist establishment. But for the growing number of vanguard elements in the working class, and particularly among its most oppressed sections – Black, Latin, Asian, Native, youth and old – there is both a great challenge and even greater opportunity.
It has been correctly said that the whip of the counterrevolution inevitably drives the revolution forward. This is equally applicable to alternating historical periods of reaction and working-class resurgence.
Since the ruling class can no longer answer the problem of economic decay and dislocation, of growing unemployment, galloping inflation, and severe social cutbacks, it will inevitably engender and revive all the truly progressive and revolutionary forces latent in the working-class movement and present the movement with the opportunity of leading the working class out of the morass of class collaboration to which it has been enchained. In this way the truly vanguard elements of the working-class movement will enter into the field of genuine revolutionary, working-class independence and lay the basis for a struggle to abolish capitalism and reconstitute society on a socialist foundation.
Last updated: 11 May 2026