The War at Home: AGR talks with Frances Fox Piven

Renowned sociologist Frances Fox Piven is the author of Why Americans Don't Vote, and, with Richard A. Cloward, Regulating the Poor, Poor People's Movements, and The New Class War and is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Sociology at the City University of New York. Prof. Piven spoke with AGR about her new book, The War at Home: The Domestic Cost's of Bush's Militarism (2004 The New Press). AGR: In your book you argue that the new wars are motivated as much by domestic goals of the right as by international goals. Could you tell me a little bit about what you mean by that? Francis Fox Piven: I suppose that the first point to be made is that the usual explanations of foreign wars in terms of international relations or international threats or international aggressive goals have been very weak. Just what it is that we're trying to accomplish by this aggression–the idea for example that the United States needs to enlarge its military footprint and the impact that has, doesn't seem to be very persuasive because the United States has the largest military footprint by far in the world. The idea that we did it for gas and oil, even that–while it is true that we didn't invade a country that produced figs, but one that produced oil, we wanted the oil–the costs of this aggression on the one hand and trends like the shattering of American soft power and multilateral relations and the rather uncertain gains that have been made in terms of energy supplies, all of this makes it seem a kind of illusive and unsatisfactory explanation. On the other hand, if you turn to the domestic uses of war, the uses of war to shore up the base of the Bush regime domestically, then the pieces start to fall in place. When 9-11 occurred, Bush was falling in the polls. It was a divided election, the election of 2000. In fact, Bush probably lost it and the presidency was delivered to him by the Supreme Court. After that, his poll rates sagged. It wasn't until 9-11 when, after a kind of temporary hiatus, temporary paralysis, the Bush people reemerged in the… garb of Christian saviors of the United States. It wasn't until then that Bush's poll ratings began to shoot up and they used the international threat, the war on terrorism, and the prospect of war on Iraq in the 2002 election. They used it [against] the Democrats who had wobbled and hadn't rallied to their side by endorsing the Congressional resolution that gave the president authority to go to war in Iraq. They used that to defeat, for example, the Democratic senator Max Cleland from Georgia, who was himself a triple amputee, a veteran from the Vietnam War. Nevertheless, he was defeated because he had refused to endorse the war resolution and called a traitor by the Republican propagandists. So they used the sense of international threat, the fear and the excitement, that that kind of imagery can generate in a population. They used it to improve their standing in the 2002 election and they used it again in the 2004 election. They used it to shore up power. They used it to quiet for a time divisions within the right, divisions for example between the libertarian right that wants a smaller government and a military right and the corporate right that just wants government to provide funds for a larger and larger military or to subsidize pharmaceuticals, for example, or the energy industry. So those divisions in the right were papered over for a while. And meantime, with the boost that the Republican right got from war, the President and his party in the House and in the Senate pushed through a rightwing, business oriented agenda that's really familiar from the time of Ronald Reagan. But this time they pushed very aggressively and they used war arguments to get through measures. For example, the four tax cuts that the Bush administration pushed through in the first term. The arguments on the floor of the House for big tax cuts for corporations and the affluent were arguments about war. The substance of the argument may be ridiculous, but it worked. Tom Delay said that nothing is more important in a time of war than cutting taxes. A ridiculous argument. But it helped to push through the 2003 tax cuts. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchinson, a Republican from Texas also made the argument that in a time of war we can't embarrass the President by opposing tax cut measures that he wants. Even as recently as the last session of Congress, Ted Stevens, the senator from Alaska, trying to push through a provision which would permit drilling in the Arctic Wildlife Refuge, used defense as the reason for pushing through this measure. That has happened in the past as well. In The War at Home I quote Herman Goering of the Third Reich who said at the Nuremberg trial that it's an easy matter to make ordinary people rally to war and to sacrifice their crops, their farms, their goods for war, their sons. AGR: How preferable are the Democrats as a ruling party? They seem to generally serve the same interests the Republicans do, though, from my perspective, with a little more grace and a little more realistic sense of how far things can be pushed how quick. FFP: They're preferable, I think…Clinton of course, was part Republican, and his political success, in fact, was owed to the deftness with which he stole the Republican agenda to win elections. Nevertheless, even that said, he didn't push through tax cuts like the Bush administration pushed through. He pushed through a terrible welfare law, but he also worked to try to expand health care for poor children… I think in this world, somebody who's less bad is less bad. We have to live with that. But I think there's another reason to prefer Democrats (which is not that their program is good and clear or anything of that sort) and that is that Democrats are more vulnerable to the kinds of protest movements which could well arise from among African-Americans, working class Americans, other minority groups in the United States, as wages continue to stagnate, or as working hours continue to increase, and as profits also continue to increase and at a most faster rate, and all the protective programs are dismantled. I don't expect people to swallow that forever. But I do think that the ability of people to mobilize against these policies is increased when Democrats are in power because Democrats are more vulnerable to these groups. AGR: Do you have any predictions about what will happen through the next couple of election cycles? FFP: I don't think it's going to look like the public opinion polls. I think that the ability of the right to manipulate elections has increased. It has to do partly with the nitty-gritty of the electoral process (which always was susceptible to a lot of manipulation and fraud. That's now increased with the use of computers) and will also have to do with the extraordinary propaganda capacity of the organized right, their message machine. Still, it's in a way a remarkable testament to the ability of people to resist total domination that the public opinion polls have turned against the Republican Congress and they turned against Bush. Certainly, it won't be an all-out victory in 2006. If the Democrats can make marginal gains, that will have been good, although it will be good for the reasons that I suggested, not because the Democrats are the carriers of progressive politics, but because they are more vulnerable, more susceptible to influence by protest from below, especially from the more progressive constituencies in the United States. Elections matter, but they don't matter in the way they're supposed to matter. They don't translate public opinion into policy. Rather, they can become a kind of template through which protest movements have an impact on public policy and then on subsequent elections.