The (non-)confessions of St. Ralph

But the left colluded in its own defeat and ongoing irrelevance. In one telling passage, Nader notes that the last president to back a progressive social policy agenda was none other than that great lefty, Richard Nixon, who proposed a host of reform legislation including a national minimum income plan as an alternative to welfare and a comprehensive health insurance proposal. Nader fails to mention that the left helped defeat both, believing it could win more for the poor by holding out. Instead it won a backlash against the poor and against the ineffectual Democratic Party by working-class Democrats, which led to the election of Ronald Reagan.

Nader correctly charts the way business began to fight back in the early 1970s, against laws (signed by Nixon) establishing the Occupational Health and Safety Agency, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. This no doubt made a difference: Jimmy Carter's 1976 post-Watergate victory represented the last gasp of New Deal/Great Society liberalism. But while aggressive political counterpunching by big business helped, so did the Democrats' -- and the Democratic left's -- incompetence. By the end of the 1970s, the energy crisis, runaway inflation, rising welfare rates, crumbling schools and inner cities and the failure of foreign policy that led to the Iran hostage crisis convinced Americans that Democrats and so-called big government couldn't manage a changing world. That ushered in the Reagan-Bush era, which may ultimately turn out to be the Nixon-Reagan-Bush-Bush-probably not poor Dick Cheney era, with the Carter and Clinton years turning out to be mutant flashes in an otherwise solid two generations of Republican dominance. Time will tell.

What's already clear is that Nader has no clue about how to challenge Republican dominance in any lasting way. He has some decent instincts about what's wrong with the left: He hates identity politics, for instance. That's partly because he's more partial to a class analysis of American inequality, but especially because in the last election, identity politics rose up and bit him in the ass, when women, gay and minority Democratic leaders pretty shamefully distorted his record to say he wasn't good on their issues, in order to help Al Gore.

But if they were wrong when it came to the letter of Nader's career and his record, they were on to something when it came to the spirit. Nader's rejection of the crass appeals of victimology by various Democratic constituencies reflected both his integrity and his arrogance. How dare Democratic Party feminists deny his strong record on women's rights, he says in "Crashing the Party." Why, "in the early 60s," he writes, "I started collecting material for a book on discrimination against women in the United States only to open the newspaper to discover Betty Friedan's 'The Feminine Mystique' did it better than I ever could. All this was years before Gloria came upon her life's mission." What a sensitive New Age guy, you first think, but it doesn't quite sit well: Is he staking a claim to being one of feminism's founding fathers? Needling Steinem for being late to her own party? There's something off about the preachy tone.

Likewise, he's somewhat sympathetic when he describes his anguish at the fact that black Democrats and their allies tried to impugn his civil rights record to promote Gore. He lays out his work on racial issues, from efforts to improve banks' lending practices in poor, minority neighborhoods, to clean up toxic brownfields in those same areas, even to make landlords eliminate lead paint (which still poisons too many low-income black children) from slum buildings. But then he kvetches, ungracefully, about how blacks don't care enough about the issues he deems important, harping instead on such things as police brutality and racial profiling.

His work to eliminate environmental racism, he writes, should have won him more black support: "The discrimination inherent in 'breathing while black' deserves at least equal attention to 'driving while black.'" Says who? I'm sure Nader has no idea how arrogant that sounds. He just doesn't get it: He can't pick the black community's issues, or anybody's issues; a successful political leader has to start from where people are, and try to reach them there.

But I can forgive Nader his confusion about how to handle the left's fractious interest groups and their shortsighted leaders, to whom almost no liberal (except maybe Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown) has stood up when running for office, and lived to tell about it. What I ultimately can't forgive is the sanctimony that makes Nader, and his prominent followers, the antithesis of what's needed to galvanize a cross-class, cross-race, broad-based American left.

Nader's supporters are worse than he is, but in the book he seems blind to their insufferable self-righteousness. He affectionately quotes his buddy Michael Moore haranguing college students, warning that if they vote for Gore as the lesser of two evils "you're going to have a miserable life!" We see Susan Sarandon express sadness, not anger, when her friend Gloria Steinem attacks Nader; with probably unconscious condescension she suggests the feisty feminist is scared to buck the Democrats: "I would ask Gloria ... to stop being so frightened," she says. The enlightened Tim Robbins also sees fear paralyzing Gore voters. "It's a frightening threshold to cross," he says of his decision to join the Greens, "but an essential one." The book helped me formulate exactly what I can't stand about so many Nader backers: They exude an inner certainty that deep down they're better people than the rest of us -- braver, happier, smarter, more full of integrity, probably better friends, better parents, better lovers. Maybe Robbins is right: They frighten me.

Next Page: If Ralph doesn't get his hands dirty with real politics, he'll achieve nothing

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