Commentary No. 10, Feb. 15, 1999
"The Clinton Impeachment"
Now that Clinton has been acquitted by the U.S. Senate of the two charges of which he was impeached, it is time to reflect on the most curious aspect of this long political drama. Bill Clinton has been the most conservative Democratic president of the twentieth century. He came to prominence as the leader of a movement internal to the Democratic Party seeking to eliminate all vestiges of leftist tendencies within the Democratic Party. He promised to be the president who would "end welfare as we know it," and he has in fact achieved this, to the dismay of the majority of the Democratic Party.
One might have thought that Republicans would have been indulgent towards such a committed centrist in politics. And yet, from the very moment he assumed his office in 1993, he has been the object of relentless hatred on the part of rightwing Republicans, particularly those from the Southern states, from which he himself comes. Only one previous Democratic president has been subject to such hatred - Franklin Delano Roosevelt. But he inspired hatred particularly among the wealthy in the northeastern states, who considered him, a scion of an old "aristocratic" family, as a "traitor to his class," because he fathered the New Deal. But Clinton is the opposite of Roosevelt, a politics right of center rather than left of center, and from a poor family, not a wealthy one.
To explain this curious passion, we must look at the United States through four different time prisms, only one of which is peculiar to the United States. The first is 1968, which reflected a key cultural break in the United States, as elsewhere in the world. The most notorious, if not the most important, thing that is symbolized by 1968 is a certain break with what was considered conventional mores in most countries before then. In the U.S., the revolution of 1968 was marked by opposition to the U.S. role in the Vietnam war. It was also marked by a relaxed attitude towards drug use and sexual activity of all kinds. Bill Clinton is of that generation. He is scarcely an extreme exponent of the "counter-culture," but he did oppose the war in Vietnam. He did manage not to be drafted. He did smoke marijuana. And of course, he is politically committed to abortion rights, to fair treatment for gays and lesbians, and to the right of privacy. The so-called Christian right came into existence as a political movement precisely to combat all these cultural changes. What they have discovered is the degree to which their views on these matters are now those of a beleaguered minority.
The second time span is longer. I date it to 1945. Up until 1945, in the United States, as in all other Western countries, indeed as in all other countries, political, economic, and social power was concentrated in the hands of the male members of the majority ethnic group. In the case of the United States, these were the so-called WASPs, the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Every president, almost all members of the national political elite, the members of the Supreme Court, the heads of corporations, the presidents of universities (indeed the professors) virtually all came from that group. The postwar period brought about a cultural revolution different from that of sexual mores, and probably more important. It was the revolution we call today in the U.S. "multiculturalism." Since 1945, persons other than male WASPs have risen to high positions in all the U.S. structures (and parallel things have occurred in many other countries). In the U.S., this shift has been associated with the Democratic Party, to a large degree. Take a look at the House Judiciary Committee which voted the articles of impeachment. On the Republican side, voting for, was a group composed exclusively of WASPs, almost all from the South, and all but one male. On the Democratic side, voting against, were Catholics, Jews, Blacks, women, a gay, and one male Southern WASP. Is it so difficult to see in this passion the rebellion of the male WASPs against what they perceive as their diminished role in U.S. society?
The third time span, this one exclusively American, is 1865 - the end of the Civil War and the emancipation, then the enfranchisement of Black Americans. Ever since, the great political fear of the Southern elites has been an electoral alliance of the Blacks and the poor Whites. U.S. politics, especially in the U.S. South, may be said to have revolved around this issue. At first such an electoral alliance seemed to take form, first in the Reconstruction period, and later in the early days of the U.S. populist movement. But is was squelched by the disfranchisement of the Blacks and the construction of the Ku Klux Klan to channel the sentiments of poor Whites. The South became a one-party Democratic zone, controlled by very conservative Democrats. As the Ku Klux Klan was dismantled and as the Blacks slowly regained their electoral rights after 1945, the conservative Southern Democrats shifted their political allegiance to the Republican party, succeeding by the 1990's in turning the one-party Democratic South into a virtually one-party Republican South. What Clinton represents in the South is the alliance of centrist poor Whites with the Black electorate. He represents thus the greatest threat to conservative politics in the U.S. South since the 1890's. No wonder, anti-Clinton sentiment is particularly strong among the Republican right coming from the South.
Finally, one should not leave out one further element. It may have been common knowledge that Roosevelt, Eisenhower,
Kennedy, Johnson, and many others had mistresses and affairs,. but no one raised the issue publicly. It was common
knowledge but it was not public knowledge. This was because of the self-restraint of the political opposition and of the
press. Why did such self-restraint not play a role now? It is not that people have a different attitude today towards
extra-marital sex (if anything, Puritanism was far stronger previously) but that the generalized legitimation of state
institutions, and therefore the "respect" for the role of the President, has seriously declined - in the U.S. as throughout the
world. It is not that Clinton has made respect for the presidency decline, but quite the opposite. In that the respect for the
presidency having declined, political opponents and the press felt free to make public what had previously been merely
common knowledge. This change in attitude towards the state on the part of ordinary people is perhaps the most
fundamental issue behind the Clinton impeachment, but the explanation for it goes far beyond anything that occurred in the
U.S. and needs to be analyzed at greater length than we can do here.
Immanuel Wallerstein
[Copyright by Immanuel Wallerstein. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to download, forward electronically or e-mail to others and to post this text on non-commercial community Internet sites, provided the essay remains intact and the copyright note is displayed. To translate this text, publish it in printed and/or other forms, including commercial Internet sites and excerpts, contact the author at iwaller@binghamton.edu; fax: 1-607-777-4315.
These commentaries, published twice monthly, are intended to be reflections on the contemporary world scene, as seen
from the perspective not of the immediate headlines but of the long term.]
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