With reckless abandon and contemptuous disdain of the people’s will, the extreme right wing steamrollered democratic and constitutional principles in order to guarantee that all three branches of the federal government – including the White House – are in their hands.

The suppression of the vote before and on Election Day, and the undercounting of tens of thousands of votes afterward, was pervasive, systematic and coordinated. It was a scorched earth, win-at-all-costs policy of the Republican right, complete with intimidation by state police and hired thugs, purged voter registration rolls, old and inefficient voting machines and confusing ballots.

Targeted with a special vengeance were African-American, Haitian and Latino voters throughout Florida. The reason is simple. Had minority voters had the same access to the polls as voters in the wealthy white communities and had their votes been fully and fairly counted, Al Gore would be the president-elect rather than Dubya.

This assault on our democracy, as New York Rep. Gerald Nadler bravely said, reeks with "the whiff of fascism." Virulent racism against African-American, Haitian, Latino and other racially oppressed peoples, anti-Semitism, and the complete contempt for democratic norms and institutions were the footsteps on Bush’s march to the White House.

Some would now like to turn this election theft by Bush operatives into a fading historical memory. Let bygones be bygones, they argue. As an abstract idea this sounds good on the surface. But a closer look reveals it has little merit.

In fact, anything less than a full investigation of the travesty of justice that occurred in Florida would be politically and morally wrong. Such an investigation should be conducted by a national people’s commission of inquiry – not by Dubya’s Justice Department or Civil Rights Commission.

The next four years is shaping up to be a defining moment for our country, simultaneously pregnant with huge dangers and political possibilities.

The future of our nation and our fundamental democratic rights are at stake.

Our task is to try to make the most rounded assessments of this defining political and economic moment and, in turn, to develop appropriate tactics and strategy.

To a degree our deliberations will involve an element of speculation. Some of our conclusions will be somewhat tentative. This is, after all, a developing struggle and still in its early stages.

In all probability we won’t get it all right and we may not agree on every detail. But that’s understandable, given the newness of the situation.

The main thing, however, is that we have a full and frank discussion and then allow unfolding events to test our conclusions. If they don’t hold up, we will make appropriate corrections. Even if they do, we should assume that constantly refining our assessments and decisions is imperative as conditions change.

On Jan. 20, the Bush administration enters the White House. Bush and his cabinet appointees are of a conservative cast of mind. Moderates and centrists they aren’t. To the contrary, they occupy the right wing on the political spectrum.

A quick glance at their political biography, political connections and political record amply confirm this point. One newspaper said that "those encouraged by Mr. Bush to expect a moderately conservative cabinet are now confronted with a team that features several key players chosen to reassure the ideological and corporate wings of conservative Republicanism."

That newspaper went on to mention the religious fundamentalist John Ashcroft and Gale Norton, the proposed Secretary of the Interior and former understudy to Reagan appointee James Watt, as exemplars of the right-wing makeup of the new administration.

But if there were still any illusions about the political coloration of Bush’s Cabinet, he has since erased them by adding extreme right-wing luminaries Linda Chavez and Donald Rumsfeld.

Political pundits have made much of the racial and gender diversity of the Bush team. It’s as diverse as Clinton’s, they say. But what Wall Street really likes is the similar class outlook of the Cabinet appointees.

There are no political wild cards, no alien class influences in this bunch to rain on Bush’s parade. You won’t find anybody on this team hanging out in a neighborhood tavern in Pittsburgh. This gang is upper crust and proud of it. No one should expect any confusion on their part about where their class loyalties lie.

While they are not all flame-throwers like Tom Delay or Rush Limbaugh, make no mistake about it, Bush’s team has solid right-wing credentials.

In the end, Bush’s appointees are the chosen representatives of the most reactionary, most anti-labor, most anti-women, most anti-people, racist and bellicose sections of transnational capital.

Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, and Donald Rumsfeld – not Pat Robertson and the Christian Coalition – are setting the political and legislative agenda for this administration. Despite this, the cultural warriors and religious fundamentalists, like Robertson, seem very happy with Bush’s choices.

What should we anticipate coming from Bush’s White House? Left to its own devices, a Bush administration would aggressively pursue a reactionary course of action at home and abroad.

On the domestic front, a Bush administration would:

• turn Medicare and Social Security into a vast arenas of profit-making and taking;

• privatize our public education system by using vouchers and giving a green light to for-profit schools;

• eliminate affirmative action, women’s right to choose, gay rights and bilingual education;

• severely curtail immigrant rights;

• squeeze labor out of the political-electoral arena as well as make union organizing impossible and union-busting even easier than it already is;

• tighten corporate control over the election process;

• expand the use of the death penalty;

• impose harsher requirements for people on all forms of government relief;

• further fill our prisons, wink at racial profiling and police brutality; turn our land, air, water, forests, and other natural resources over to commercial interests while forestalling any action on global warming;

• And it would turn a deaf ear to the critical needs of our cities and rural communities, both of which are mired in crisis.

In short, this administration’s domestic policies would greatly sharpen the struggle on all fronts. It will greatly intensify class exploitation and racial and gender oppression, while curtailing democratic rights all along the line.

Baby Bush has learned well from Daddy Bush. He will show little hesitation to punish the racially oppressed as well as to play the cards of division – especially the race card – when necessary. He did it in the election campaign as well as in the vote count in Florida.

More broadly, the extreme right is skillful at finding wedge issues to divide the people along one or another line. Granted wedge issues don’t resonate like they did in the past, but they still influence and confuse millions.

Thus, we have to become more effective fighters for all forms of unity. What is required is not simply broad appeals for unity. We have to expose the demagogy of the right wing and make crystal clear the necessity of working-class, multiracial and all-people’s unity. No one is doing anyone else a favor in this struggle for unity – it is in the fundamental interests of the entire class and people.

On the international front, the Bush administration’s policy would be extremely aggressive, mirroring its domestic policy. I’ve read that isolationist tendencies might dominate the foreign policy of the new administration, but nothing could be further from the truth.

This administration would show little hesitation to project American military power around the world. We can expect a hardening of relations with Cuba and a hostile attitude toward anti-imperialist movements and governments in Puerto Rico, Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, other countries in South America and elsewhere. A Bush White House. will weigh in against the cause of Palestinian statehood at this dangerous juncture in the crisis in the Middle East.

The Bush administration is determined not to be constrained by multilateral agreements and supranational bodies, including the United Nations. It is going to vigorously defend – with military, economic and diplomatic power – what it calls the "national" interests (read "transnational corporate interests").

Perhaps most ominously, this administration, by saying that it will introduce the arms race into space, breathes new life into the nuclear weapons race that in the past decade has eased somewhat. Space weapons are the administration’s trump card to dominate the world.

To claim that this is a reluctant, but necessary response to "rogue states is nothing but a ruse to impose a "made in the USA" new world order on humanity.

This aggressive posture corresponds with the new stage of globalization, the new stage of imperialism, the new stage of interimperialist rivalry and the new stage of monopoly capitalism. U.S. imperialism has not given up its hegemonic aims.

Indeed, the Bush White House will seek to strengthen the dominance of U.S. imperialism on a global scale over its enemies and friends. Not Powell, Rumsfeld, Rice or Cheney are ready for U.S. imperialism to forgo its single superpower status and everything that comes with that.

To be sure, interimperialist rivalry is growing in intensity, but this administration has no intentions of overseeing the weakening of the dominant status of U.S. imperialism in world affairs. Just the opposite, in fact. In the past, such rivalry led to world conflagrations.

I’m not suggesting that such a prospect is imminent now. It isn’t. In fact, much more likely are growing tensions with Russia and China, resulting from the confrontational attitude of the new administration to these two powerful states. Nevertheless, over the longer term we should not rule out wars between competing capitalist states.

The role of the Bush administration, and for that matter the Clinton administration, calls into question the claim by some on the left that the state apparatus is turning into a paper tiger in a globalizing world.

Maybe that depends on in which part of the world you sit. But from our vantage point in the center of world imperialism the role of the state as an enforcer of the interests of the transnational corporations and as an instrument to create the most favorable conditions for capital accumulation has been enhanced in recent years.

Given the growth of transnational capital and growing inter-capitalist rivalry, any other outcome would seem illogical and goes against historical experience.

Given what appears to be the governing posture of Bush and the Republican leadership in Congress, mass struggle and unity is the order of the day. People’s majorities and unity are the only way to derail the reactionary Republican policies and set the stage for an anti-ultraright, anti-corporate, all-people’s counteroffensive.

The 2002 elections are crucial but should not be a substitute for immediate and militant struggles on tax cuts, education, Social Security, labor rights, medicare, affirmative action, ending racial profiling, women’s right to choose, election reform, immigrant and constitutional rights, the death penalty, the environment, military spending and aggression, and other issues.

At the core of this movement will be the main forces that brought tens of millions of people to the polls on Election Day. But the scope of the movement should be broader and deeper than the election 2000 coalition.

It should include the tens of millions who either voted for Gore or sat out the election for one reason or another. It should include the supporters of Nader’s candidacy. It should include the young people in the antiglobalization movement. It should include the new independent political formations, like the New Party and the Greens.

It should include a section of voters who cast their ballot for Bush, but agreed with Gore on many of his main campaign issues.

It should include a new approach to win supporters in rural America and the South. Given the demographic changes, the new industrial landscape and the history of struggle in the South, there is no reason, as the ballot struggle in Florida attests, why the right wing should have a lock on this critical region of the country.

Finally, it should include sections of the Democratic Party and even moderate Republicans. Let’s face facts: to forestall Bush’s legislative initiatives and pass people’s legislation between now and 2002 requires that some congressional Republicans swing to the Democratic side.

Thus, broad and flexible tactics, enlarging our tactical and coalition sights, expanding our vision of the politically possible, finding new forms to unite broad sections of the American people, taking advantage of differences in the ruling class, and above all, fighting for broad unity is imperative now.

How quickly and on what scale the labor and people’s coalitions move into action is hard to say, but recent statements by labor and people’s leaders and actions planned around the King holiday and the inauguration suggest that people’s engines are being restarted after a grueling election campaign.

No doubt the appointment of Ashcroft and Chavez had a sobering effect and presents an immediate opportunity to organize a broad coalition to demand the withdrawal of both appointments by Bush. We should join that effort. [One down, one to go. Chavez has since withdrawn.]

We should explore new forms of broad unity that will help to organizationally sustain and give a more definitive programmatic thrust to this developing coalition. At the same time we have to appreciate that movements develop in their own way and at their own pace. Sometimes they can’t be squeezed into our political and organizational molds. Our own nation’s history suggests that.

Finally, we should examine the role of the broad left, of which we are an integral part. Given present circumstances, the emphasis of the left should be on initiating struggles, injecting militancy, building unity and projecting a program of struggle around which broad forces can unify. The left will be an effective force to the extent that it engages and works with the center. Otherwise, it might as well go into hibernation for four years.

The most advanced demands of the center are the grounds on which left-center unity begins and the basis for mobilizing tens of millions against the policies of the Bush administration and transnational capital. The left can’t do it alone. If they could, they would have done it long ago. Politics, Lenin once said, begins where there are millions.