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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
So go back to your angry Democratic relatives this Thanksgiving and tell them they were right about 2000. The apology I suggest is: "Yes, given the fact that Gore ran a crappy campaign and represented a fatally compromised party buried in corporate sleaze up to its Hair Club for Men implants, and that he used the word 'lockbox' repeatedly and had the most irritating scold in the history of the world as his running mate and generally came off like a grumpy vice-principal and seemed eager to capitulate when the Republicans disenfranchised thousands of black and Jewish and elderly voters and stole the election -- once you accept all of that and the hanging chads and the Rehnquist court as natural and inevitable, then, yes, the 40,000 or so Nader votes in Florida that would have otherwise gone to Gore (leaving aside the question of the 800,000 or so Florida Democrats who voted for Bush) cost the Democrats the election." That ought to promote some healing around the holiday hearth.
As Nader points out in his response to McVoy's letter, if the Democrats pushed for electoral reform, and if we had something like the proportional-representation or instant runoff voting system used in several European countries, the spoiler effect of third-party candidates would be neutralized. Under such a system, Gore would presumably have won in 2000, even with Nader and Pat Buchanan and your raving libertarian granddad and whomever else on the ballot. But that's even more of a pipe dream than Nader's goony Capitol Hill bird-watching fantasy. In the current, corporate-dominated system, the oligarchies of both parties thrive on low levels of citizen participation.
By Thanksgiving we will know -- dear God, let us hope we will know -- who won this year's election, which ought to dictate the tone of that frank chat around your family fireside. If Bush wins, the Democrats will find a way to blame Nader. Take that to the bank. If John Kerry wins, much of the credit will belong to the independent left groups (most entirely unconnected to the Democratic Party) who have worked so hard to register young voters, African-Americans, recent immigrants and other disenfranchised groups, and motivate them to participate.
That's exactly the sort of civic engagement Nader's new pamphlet -- and his life's work -- calls for and exemplifies. As Ralph himself fades into oddball irrelevance, the perma-candidate of the perennially disgruntled, his final legacy may be a host of younger activists, both in mainstream politics and street-level direct action, who are fighting a last-ditch battle for democracy.
Personally, I hold out little hope for Kerry and the Democrats. Oh, Kerry may be elected, and I'll be appropriately grateful if that happens. (If I lived somewhere in the 10 percent of America where counting the votes actually matters, I'd even vote for him.) I'm told he's an intelligent man, and likable when you get to know him. But here's his platform as I understand it. On Iraq: More war. Lots more war. In fact, let's dig ourselves into an LBJ-style nightmare and let President John McCain get us out of there in 2009. On gays and lesbians: Love you guys! But please shut up. On healthcare: My complicated new government program is not a complicated new government program!
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes: Kerry is a lot better than Bush on the environment, abortion, civil liberties and judicial appointments. Again, it's a comparison between that good-looking real estate guy who only gouged you a little and Chucky, the devil doll from the "Child's Play" movies. It's possible to draw these distinctions, and to see the almost apocalyptic importance of getting rid of Bush and Ashcroft and Cheney, while still holding in your head Nader's idea that the current system stinks, and that American democracy will die (if it hasn't already) unless it's reclaimed by citizen action, in daily life and at the ballot box.
For all his hectoring, all his puritanism, all his near-total disconnection from contemporary culture, Nader is still capable of striking eloquence. In his letter to Robert J. Cirincione Jr., a recent college graduate from Hagerstown, Md., he waxes almost Hegelian about the social control corporations now exert, such that the values young people now absorb in adolescence are those of corporate capitalism, not citizen democracy. Big business has been a profoundly anti-democratic force in American history, he says, and a government that privileges big business over ordinary people is paving the way toward fascism.
Greed and lies have disenfranchised almost an entire generation, Nader writes, who have absorbed the lesson that no one can be trusted and everything is for sale. We need to resist the effects of "growing up corporate," so that "we are free to see the present as reality rather than a bundle of myths, deceptions, tinsel temptations, and ideological rigor mortis." This seems to echo Marx's famous "all that is solid melts into air" passage from "The Communist Manifesto." But even Marx, driven by dreams of a distant social transformation that would never come to pass (at least not the way he imagined), was far too hard-headed to seek to undermine a mainstream "bourgeois" reformer in a campaign against a blood-drinking neo-imperialist zealot.
As today's other great advocate of citizen participation, Marshall Mathers, might put it, I'm still feeling you, Ralph. You're right about the big picture, and I'll always appreciate the way you filled people like Joe Lieberman and Al From with Kierkegaardian self-loathing. But all those people who hate you are also right, this time around: You're kind of acting like a creep. The house is on fire, as in right now, and your pissing and moaning isn't going to put it out. Or at least not the moaning.
