It's our worst nightmare: Clarence Thomas chose the President. Al Gore's past enthusiasm for reactionary Supreme Court justices, so assiduously ignored by liberals, came back to haunt him.

It was remarkable, actually, that Gore got as far as he did in his effort to have legally cast votes actually counted. George W. Bush, by happy circumstance, had the Florida game rigged in his favor nearly every step of the way: with his brother as governor, his state co-chair (and reported secret lover, according to CounterPunch) as Secretary of State, and a Republican majority in the state legislature. And then there was the Supreme Court--where family members of both Scalia and Thomas were working for the Bush campaign, and where Chief Justice Rehnquist was accused by several witnesses in 1964 of intimidating and preventing minorities from voting, as a poll-watcher in a South Phoenix precinct. All three should have recused themselves; if any one of them had, the Florida Supreme Court would have been upheld on a 4-4 decision, and Gore would be President. A Miami Herald analysis shows that Gore won the state by about 20,000 votes--without even counting the Buchanan votes in Palm Beach County, or the minorities prevented from voting in the first place.

In the end, the five Republican-appointed U.S. Supreme Court justices decided that the state legislature--not the voters of Florida--had the sole right to pick the President, and that the Florida Supreme Court had erred because it didn't change the law when it was legally prohibited from doing so. They threw out a standard for vote-counting also used in 33 other states, without questioning the votes in those states. It's a shocking decision, made a bit more bearable only because it's such a bizarre case that it's not likely to set a precedent. But the justices went out of their way, inventing case law and renouncing 200 years of conservative adherence to the principles of federalism, to put Bush in office. The odds that five Republican justices would just happen to find for their guy, and four Democratic justices would just happen to dissent for their guy, are astronomical; it had nothing to do with law, and everything to do with power.

But that, apparently, is history. What was at stake with this semi sanitized coup d'etat, anyway?

Not much, at the macro policy level. We already knew that we were going to get neoliberalism, military interventions, Star Wars, conservative court appointments, environmental degradation, stagnant wages, more prisons, and so forth, no matter who won; the differences were a matter of degree. Most of Bush's advisors are the same mandarins who littered the Reagan/Bush Sr. landscape for 12 years, and they are genuinely scary people. Of course, so were Madeleine Albright, Janet Reno, and Ron Brown. But for Bush's entourage, "sleazeball" isn't just a resume enhancer; it's a job requirement. The same goes for Bush's Cabinet picks; even the Democrats being mentioned are, in a word, awful. (Almost the only solace is that Bush's election probably lessens the chance of Israeli/Palestinian war.)

Bush's impact will be more cultural than political: the revenge of the privileged WASP. Bush isn't dangerous because he's a moron (he's not, incidentally); it's because he's no empath. How could he be, when he's never had to work an honest day in his life? Bill Clinton's genius was in doing all the wrong things while making his victims feel good about it. That's over.

We already had these people for 12 years, but we weren't the world's sole superpower then. Get ready for our bipartisan ruling classes--the Democrats, remember, have been busy electing conservative millionaires like Cantwell for the past four years--to issue one triumphant, snarling "Fuck you" to the world's poor.

The next four years won't be pretty. The NASDAQ collapse was more than a blip; it was a presage, one of many, of an inevitable end to Wall Street's ever-expanding economic party. Workers who wondered why their wages stalled during good times will find big business--now accustomed to hefty profits-- responding by slashing the work force, and by trying to raid Social Security. Social safety nets that didn't seem important in the '90s will be gone when they're needed. We'll miss all those infrastructure investments we didn't make when we could afford them.

The media, which generally rooted for Gore, likes to underestimate George W. Bush. The hills are alive with the sound of imperial pundits urging us to "heal" (I wasn't aware I was sick), horrified by the "lack of a mandate" (read: stolen election), and glumly fearing that Bush will be weak and Congress won't do much. We should be so lucky. Class trumps party. The two parties may now hate each other more than ever, but if the economy falters, Bush's desire to cut taxes and shovel still more money to the wealthy will find a receptive audience amongst the alarmed millionaires in Congress. And if taxes aren't slashed, it'll be because the federal surplus will instead be used to pay down the national debt--fattening the banks instead. Either way, we lose.

Democrats have fully bought into what Bush Sr. once famously called "voodoo economics." After 20 years of conservative court appointments, gutted government programs, environmental exploitation, weapon boondoggles and other corporate welfare, expanding gaps between haves and have-nots, and expanding prisons to house the latter, it won't take too much more to inflict some truly irrevocable damage on our society. Don't count on the Democrats to try to prevent it. They'll be busy claiming credit.

For 20 years, beginning with Reagan's tax cuts, the wealthy have been waging class war on everyone else in America. Now, after 20 years of steady gains under Reagan, Bush Sr., and Clinton/Gore, and with George W. Bush illegally installed as President, that war is finally likely to become obvious to most of its victims over the next four years. That's actually cheerier news than if Gore had won out, and apologists for their own doom like the AFL-CIO and the Sierra Club had continued to lick the boots of power like some pathetic abused dog.

With the Democrats hopelessly corrupted, and electoral alternatives like the Greens or Labor Party a long ways away under the best of scenarios, the only possible counter-balance at hand is the encouraging, global growth of civil society institutions, through which people have been demanding the public policy values that profit-driven capitalism alone can never deliver.

Governments under global capitalism respond almost entirely to the needs of corporations. Getting those governments, including our own, to also become responsive to the demands of civil society will be the great challenge facing us during the King George II years. Class war is happening not just under George W. Bush, but all over the world, and together the attackees are very, very strong.

Organize, organize, organize.