It’s easy to understand why some Democrats are dismayed with Ralph Nader right now. Seriously, Ralph? Yet another imaginary bid for the White House? Don’t you have a job? Now, I’m not sure his latest presidential run is “bad for the country,” as Hillary Clinton has claimed; I don’t even think that it’s bad for the Democratic Party—after all, Nader claimed less than a half-percent of the popular vote in 2004, and given the general trend of repeat third-party candidates, he should draw an even smaller share of the vote this time around. But I do think his candidacy is potentially bad for progressivism in general. Though Nader is, as Bob Herbert astutely points out, “one of just a handful of people over the past century with a legitimate claim to the designation ‘great American,’” there are some very good reasons to be upset about his candidacy, quite apart from the conventional “spoiler” talk that seems to be dominating his coverage right now.
Some Democrats seem to ascribe an almost supernatural power to Nader, as though he were a cursed rabbit’s foot that ruins the party for everyone every four years. This, too, is understandable. Partly, I think that Democrats are simply tired of feeling like losers. In the past forty years, we’ve had one centrist (yet hysterically pilloried) and one prescient (but largely ineffectual) president. The Republicans, on the other hand, have steamrolled us with some very powerful (though cognitively impaired) chief executives who, far from merely advancing a conservative agenda, have seemed intent on returning us to the so-called Gilded Age, complete with robber barons and immigrant ghettos. The 2000 election only made matters worse for many Democrats’ already tenuous grip on hope or, frankly, self-esteem. In a way, the strange effect of Al Gore’s many honors over the last two years has been to make us feel even more like a bunch of schmucks. If we can’t even get a decent guy like Gore elected, well, what the hell is wrong with us? The blame gets spread around like manure. Gore ran a crappy campaign. The Republicans cheated. The media routinely used Gore as a whipping boy. The American people let themselves down. (All true, of course.) And, of course, there’s that damned Ralph Nader ruining things in Florida (and New Hampshire, everyone seems to forget). Though there are certainly legitimate reasons to be angry with Nader for the 2000 election, it does seem that he’s become a symbol for all liberal failure since then. On the face of things, this is certainly a cop-out. But there is a certain logic at work here that deserves exploring.
After 2000, a lot of Democrats seemed to decide that winning ought to be our top priority. Unfortunately, the party’s version of winning strategy seemed to involve nominating John Kerry (because he was the “electable” one) and then watching as his campaign systematically eliminated everything that actually distinguished him as a gifted public servant (and he was, once upon a time) from his platform and political persona. One more election down in flames. Though initially there was some talk about the role that “values” played in the election, not to mention the “framing” craze, eventually it seemed to dawn on many in the party that not only the Democratic base but much of the general electorate seemed impatient with the sort of timid, half-apologetic liberalism of its past several presidential party platforms. The party’s congressional victories in the midterm election appeared to vindicate this point of view. It seemed clear that, at last, we were going to see the beginnings of real reform. Instead, of course, we got the 110th Congress.
Buh.
Despite being wrong on nearly every other issue of substance, William Kristol had a point in a recent column in which he pointed out that being an opposition party can have a stultifying effect on original thought. This is particularly true in political strategy. Democrats’ version of a killer instinct always seems to involve hunkering down and playing defense. And the Republicans blitzkrieg past them every time. Meanwhile, progressives can’t even get their policy initiatives on the table. Even listening to Obama and Clinton—who, once again, are pushing the most vigorous progressive policy reforms since Lyndon Johnson was in office—many of us are dismayed over how modest their proposals actually are compared with what needs to be done. How many times can two people yammer at each other about the intricacies of their incremental health care proposals when most sensible people agree that what we ultimately need is single-payer universal coverage?
So I sympathize with Ralph Nader. I really do. To devote one’s life to progressive causes—and achieve more than any other single individual, by some assessments—only to see this country lurch more and more predictably toward harmful social inequality, obsessive military interventionism and do-nothing, “Government is bad, m’kay” domestic policies, while the Democrats kvetch and wring their hands and “strategize”… Well, obviously, I agree with Nader on a lot of things. I agree that the Democrats’ energy and environmental agendas are too timid; I agree that we ought to have 100% pubic financing for elections to national office; I agree that rooting out and punishing corporate malfeasance should be a priority for the next administration; and I agree that the two-party system is suffocating this country (more on this in a later column). I even agree with the way he gets things done—when he’s not trying to run for president. But his jump-the-shark presidential candidacies seem to represent what is desperately wrong with the public face of progressive activism in this country—the particular variety that manages to be both hopeless and smug.
Though many writers have pointed out how wrong Nader was in his “Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum” assessment of Gore and Bush in 2000, I think the worst of his thinking is revealed in his “fuck’em” attitude toward the Democratic Party. He claimed eight years ago that a Bush presidency would be sufficiently inept as to send people scurrying back to traditional progressive values in droves. Yet here he is again, complaining that the Democrats are still too ineffectual and corporate-owned. Look, Ralph, I agree with you, but if a guy like George W. Bush can’t sufficiently galvanize progressives in this country, what the hell can? And as for the argument that it’s the Democrats’ own fault for straying from its values—well, it’s all well and fine to grump that if the Party can’t beat the GOP in this climate, then they deserve to lose. But Nader’s been saying that since 1996, and I don’t see an army of idealists swarming Washington DC any time soon (thank ye merciful gods).
Of course, anyone can run for president if they meet the constitutional requirements. No one questions Nader’s freedom to run a failed political campaign if he wants to; the Libertarians and the Reform party and the Greens do it all the time. Hell, Lyndon LaRouche has made it his raison d’etre. But this is begging the point. I don’t think that it’s wrong for Ralph Nader to run for president; I just think it’s kind of purposeless and dumb. While he claims that he wants to put vital progressive issues back on the table, that isn’t what his futile presidential bids accomplish; rather, such grandstanding only succeeds in marginalizing our causes. The sad reality is that the United States is, for the most part, not so much a nation of citizens as consumers. As such, the tenor of political “discourse” has come to take the form of product placement, rather than debate. And repeated failure “sells” an idea as worthless, whatever its empirical value.
