Does voting for a third party contribute to "building a movement"? Claims of this sort are always made by charismatic figures. The results are never -- never -- delivered. The claim amounts to feel-good rhetoric to rationalize a heady campaign. Tomorrow never comes. It is a parochial fantasy.

Nader's claim that he's not the spoiler is bad faith. Perhaps he knows it, perhaps not. But there is a deeper force at work. What is at work in the Naderite camp, what lies behind the fantasy that the masses hanker for radical change, is a purist approach to politics. There are Nader supporters -- as well as Democrats of the left like Michigan's John Conyers -- who have urged Nader to drop his campaign in the states where he might throw the race to Gore. He's refused. He shows no inclination to deal. (Neither, unfortunately, does Gore.) But deal-making is how politics happens.

At bottom, Nader's all-or-nothing gambit is not politics, it is moral fundamentalism -- as if by venting one's anger, one were free to remake the world by willing it so, despite all those recalcitrant people who happen to live here.

The arrogance of this "worsism" -- the worse, the better -- is chillingly expressed by a Nader voter in Portland, Ore., interviewed in Friday's New York Times: "If Bush gets in, I feel that it might bring things to a head much more quickly. Pollution's going to increase in the short term, but I think that will bring a lot more people into the environmental movement a lot more quickly. Sometimes you've got to hit bottom before you come back up." Notice how the means -- "a lot more people into the environmental movement" -- has become the end. Notice the spurious assumption that the masses will rise up if things come "to a head." It didn't happen after Reagan's depredations on the environment. It won't happen now. As for the Nader movement, it's well-meaning and broad but an inch deep. In Eric Alterman's trenchant words in the Nation, Nader's "nascent leftist movement has virtually no support among African-Americans, Latinos or Asian-Americans. It has no support among organized feminist groups, organized gay rights groups or mainstream environmental groups. To top it all off, it has no support in the national union movement. So Nader and company are building a nonblack, non-Latino, non-Asian, nonfeminist, nonenvironmentalist, nongay, non-working people's left: Now that really would be quite an achievement."

On Earth, the only land ahead is the compromised land. Politics means satisfactions and dissatisfactions, not redemptions. There is this truth: We are condemned to share the Earth with people we dislike, even despise. In a democracy, we are condemned to share power with them. A large party -- any large party -- is a coalition of interests. Imagine the Democrats away and replace them with a left-wing party, and it would still be a coalition of interests heading for disappointment. The question about the actually existing Democrats is this: How to make them more green, more labor-friendly, less punitive? And the prerequisite -- not the guarantee, but the prerequisite -- is a vote for Democrats, starting with Al Gore.

True enough, after getting a boost from his "the people vs. the powerful" convention speech, Gore moved fitfully toward the center, and one can fight against his position on capital punishment and prisons, his trimming on gun control -- dispute all this and more far more effectively if he is president than not. If Nader had run in the primaries, or half the Naderite energy went to organizing a Million Human March to welcome Gore to Washington the day after he's inaugurated, we on the left would stand a reasonable chance of seeing a Gore more to our liking. He is, as his fans and enemies all agree, a politician. No one accuses the man of being inflexible.

Of course the parties are corrupt fundraising machines. Of course corporate lobbies run amok. Of course the Democrats need pressure. The question is, Whom do we want to put in a position to press? The choice of who will write the agenda, appoint the judges, negotiate (or tear up) the treaties, starting Jan. 20, 2001, is not between Al Gore and Jesus Christ, or, in fact, between Al Gore or Ralph Nader. In America, we're not going to get a president better than Gore. We may well get a lot worse: a country-club airhead whose occasional rhetoric of compassion obscures the fact that his deepest, most abiding, most consistent compassion is for untrammeled business. We could slam a lot of doors. Consider the choice uninspiring, but there it is, and will not be wished away -- not by fulminating against corporations, not by imagining a mass movement, not by assuming that one shirks responsibility for bad consequences because others have a monopoly on evil while we, we noble ones, we happy new, are pure, as George W. Bush would say, of heart.

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