Memo: To: Those Who Supported the Nader Campaign
Wilentz, Sean & Gitlin, Todd
S0 HERE we are in the Bush II era. No small thanks to Antonin Scalia—and you. If there is a sourness in the air, like the embittered days of 1969 or 1981, there's good reason. Much of the ground...
...The Constitution is deci94 n DISSENT / Spring 2001 sively tilted against it...
...No difference...
...And on other counts, he owes the Christian right bigger than big time...
...Gore's party has pushed up the minimum wage (not nearly high enough), DISSENT / Spring 2001 n 93 Bush's could not care less...
...They will continue to search for the way to make that desire manifest, as they ought to...
...UMBERS ASIDE, there is a deeper force at work, behind the delusion that the...
...Unemployment is low (unprecedentedly so for African-Americans and Latinos...
...Gore and the Democrats know it is happening, Bush isn't sure,and many Republicans think it is a hoax...
...Yes, Gore ran a lackluster, dispiriting campaign (and for all that still won the popular vote...
...Bush is half of an all-oil-company White House tandem...
...Fact: Turnout is surely important, especially for unregistered blue-collar voters, but waiting for a rescue mission from suddenly lefty voters is the political equivalent of the beam-meup wishfulness practiced by millennial cults— and it has the same function...
...The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Civil Rights Commission, and hundreds of other agencies make crucial decisions, most of them outside the glare of sound-bite-besotted media, affecting every aspect of everyday life...
...They will see, now, how effective is political action—one way or another...
...Gore was at least budgeable on these issues...
...It won't happen now...
...Nuclear weapons...
...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...
...11 percent...
...Labor...
...See above...
...The odds are for shrinkage, not increase, in a third party...
...Many went to the polls last November not yet knowing what to do and found their minds concentrated...
...As Eric Alterman wrote in the Nation (where seldom was heard a discouraging word), Nader's "nascent leftist movement has virtually no support among African-Americans, Latinos or Asian-Americans...
...and the auctioning off of access and bias at which W. is so spectacular that he did not even need the Lincoln bedroom—he could offer an entire government...
...The trouble is, there's no persuasive evidence that large numbers of voters have been staying home because they've lacked a left-wing alternative...
...The passion of every sect, as for every profit-obsessed corporation, is to mistake a means for an end...
...No alibis...
...It is as if by venting one's anger, one were free to remake the world by willing it so, despite all of those benighted, recalcitrant people who just happen to live here...
...As for the Nader movement, it was well-meaning and broad but an inch deep...
...Democracy is not rule by activists, it is rule by the people...
...It was, they contended, a free vote that would not spoil Gore's electoral vote...
...Then there are the limited (but scarcely unimportant) issues that the candidates actually talked about: the Social Security hoax Bush wants to perpetrate...
...Even before the election, Bush's favorite high court justices were Scalia and Clarence Thomas...
...Gore was and is an environmentalist who makes political deals...
...It has no support among organized feminist groups, organized gay rights groups or mainstream environmental groups...
...It didn't happen after Reagan's depredations on the economy and the environment...
...Myth: In some states where the polls indicated a lopsided race, Naderites proposed "strategic voting" and urged people to cast their ballots for Nader...
...Fact: Suppose, for the sake of argument, that Nader had won his 5 percent, and the Greens got federal funds in future elections...
...Here is the uncomfortable truth: We are condemned to share the Earth with people we dislike, even despise...
...In Florida, not thought to be a chief battleground state where Nader would make a difference, Nader's supporters provided Bush with his dubious margin of victory...
...On the off chance that the Greens could avoid breaking into warring camps, a la the Reform Party, what they could realistically look forward to is someday becoming, say, an 8 percent party...
...How any thoughtful person could still think that the differences are negligible boggles the mind...
...Gore knows the arguments against oil drilling...
...Labor has started to regain strength and morale (if not numbers) because the NLRB has been more hospitable to organizers...
...campaign corruption (sorry, "finance...
...That's not the country we're living in...
...Repeat, never: not in twenty to thirty years—not on labor policy, not on the environment, not on income and wealth inequality, not on support for military goons in poor countries...
...Letting the polls make up your mind for you conditioned a moral choice on the presupposition that the polls were reliable (when in fact several key states were swinging all over the place...
...Al Gore defeated Al Gore...
...Nader says that the Greens are "the only party that connects on the ground with citizens fighting for justice," but this is to mistake social movements for political forces...
...This is to forget a truth that we have just seen demonstrated, that more than 95 percent of America is to the right of the Greens...
...His campaign represented "the beginning of the end of the two-party duopoly...
...Sometimes you've got to hit bottom before you come back up...
...The Republicans practice class warfare from above...
...In a democracy, we are condemned to share power with them...
...Had half of Nader's vote nationwide gone to Gore, then Gore's victory in the popular vote would have looked all the more impressive...
...The Supreme Court...
...IN BACKING Nader, you upheld various myths that are dear to the hearts of many leftists, but that are demonstrably untrue...
...That calculated "strategic" vote was both morally problematic and politically shortsighted...
...Indeed, fingerpointing in every direction but home is the way of normal, stale politics...
...Those historic signatures represented several years of public hearings and bureaucratic preparation—all of which were being completed even while Ralph Nader denounced Clinton as no better and perhaps somewhat worse on environmental issues than his Republican predecessors...
...The claim of conscience without the work of conscientiousness is blindness...
...At many points, he washed his hands of mere earthly results...
...Myth: Nader's candidacy, by helping to elect Bush, had the effect of heightening the contradictions in America...
...Even those who have doggedly, devotedly followed Nader for decades will have a hard time bonding with him now...
...Gore wanted a tax on fossil-fuel energy—a tax that was blocked by Republicans and always will be— while Bush governed over the worst air in the country and justified it on the grounds of industrial growth...
...Tomorrow never comes...
...It was too little pragmatism, too late, from people who ordinarily despise the pragmatism of Gore supporters...
...This was, and is, a doomed enterprise...
...But most of you reading this don't have the excuse of inexperience...
...The ground to be lost by George W.'s victory is likely to stay lost...
...the Bush tax cut that Puts Billionaires First...
...Inequality...
...After at least one term of Republican rule, with its unambiguous passion for big oil, against a nuclear test ban, for Star Wars, against labor organizing, for health maintenance organizations, for kindness toward the Pinochets of the world, and so on, maybe eight years on we get to 9 percent...
...Notice how the means—"a lot more people into the environmental movement"— has become the end: the hallmark of sectarian politics...
...The Department of Justice...
...The question, in 2000, about the actually existing Democrats was this: how to make them more green, more labor-friendly, less punitive...
...The objective of politics should be to obtain political power for good causes...
...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...
...Myth: A Nader vote was costless because his candidacy created its own constituency, bringing masses hitherto demobilized (and rationally so) out of the woodwork...
...It only encouraged illusions about what Nader might accomplish next time, if only...
...Bush looks at Alaska and sees millions of barrels in profits...
...Fact: There is no such thing as a free vote...
...The mundane government appointments that shape public life in a thousand ways outside public attention...
...He loves Star Wars...
...Bush lacks even Reagan's nutty antinuclear utopianism...
...Perhaps the risk was really an opportunity—to build the Green Party...
...Rabbi Hillel, Dostoyevsky, Sartre, Gandhi (whom some of the writers among you love to quote in other connections) have all known this central principle: when one chooses, one chooses the world...
...Fact: Claims of this sort are always made by charismatic figures...
...Bush will try to abrogate the antiballistic-missile treaty...
...It will rig what it can for the bosses...
...Bush owes the fundamentalists, the union busters, the South Carolina Confederate-flag fliers...
...The Democrats are divided, but despite inconsistencies, President Clinton is responsible for an earned income tax credit, and finally, belatedly, the appalling inequality between rich and poor is shrinking...
...Fact: The arrogance of this "worsism"—the worse, the better—was chillingly expressed by a Nader voter in Portland, Oregon, interviewed by the New York Times shortly before the election: "If Bush gets in, I feel that it might bring things to a head much more quickly...
...In the end, Nader claims to have established "the fastest-growing third party in America...
...96 n DISSENT / Spring 2001...
...Perhaps he knows it, perhaps not...
...Myth: Nader was no spoiler...
...But the early Republicans were not really a third party...
...How does it feel...
...Consider the issues: Global warming...
...Notice the spurious assumption that the masses will rise up if things come "to a head...
...Not one grudging word of praise for the Clinton executive orders was heard from Nader or his followers, nor any word of regret, now that President Bush has vowed to roll back those directives and appointed Gail Norton to his cabinet...
...Poverty...
...The claim amounts to feel-good rhetoric to rationalize a heady campaign...
...His party crushed the nuclear test ban...
...They arose only when one of the existing two parties, the Whigs, had completely fallen apart along sectional lines...
...He and his buddies folded like a cheap suit when the hard-liners demanded he appoint the fire-eater John Ashcroft over the merely conservative Marc Racicot as attorney general...
...Myth: Voting for a third party contributed to "building a movement...
...In parliamentary systems, a single-digit party can win seats, enter governments, make policy—as witness the Greens in Germany and elsewhere in Europe...
...Conservation...
...The young among Nader's supporters have been properly disgusted by normal politics and are eager to see something new, fine, and fierce come into the world...
...Presumably, after the Florida shenanigans, his estimation of them has soared...
...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 Republican Party has negative interest in organized labor...
...And the prerequisite— not the guarantee, but the prerequisite— was to vote for Democrats, starting with Al Gore...
...But the pride you were speaking of preceded an earthly crash...
...Moral purists might consider that, if conscience demands responsibility, it is fanaticism that washes its hands of results...
...That's what Republicans do...
...This all-or-nothing approach, allergic to democratic contest and compromise, is rooted equally in American self-righteousness and traditional left-wing utopianism...
...In fact, Nader picked up the lion's share of his support from voters who would have voted for Gore had Nader not run...
...The Bush Court, one-third of whose membership he might get to appoint, might not repeal Roe v. Wade, not quite, not yet, but will surely tilt mightily toward corporate power, against labor, against gun control, against affirmative action...
...Never—never—do they deliver...
...For months, you and your candidate peddled the old nostrum that Democrats and Republicans are essentially the same—two names for one entitity, Republicrats...
...To imagine that either today's Democrats or Republicans are in the situation of the Whigs is a fantasy...
...And then...
...His hands would remain clean...
...To top it all off, it has no support in the national union movement...
...TODD GITLIN teaches at New York University...
...Naderites sometimes cite the birth of the antislavery Republican Party in 1854 as the great third-party counter-example in our history...
...Fact: Nader's claim that he was not the spoiler is bad faith...
...Bush doesn't owe labor a thing— to the contrary...
...Heaven was nigh...
...masses hanker for radical change that Gore would not give them—a purist approach to politics...
...You either remember or know about 1968, with Nixon and five more years of the Vietnam War...
...Much of the ground lost to the right in recent decades after the left and liberals divided—especially the ground lost under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s—has never been regained...
...CNN has reported that half the Nader vote would have gone to Gore—more than enough to put Gore over the top...
...A large party—any large party—is a coalition of interests...
...affirmative action, which Bush wants to end, not mend...
...With Bush in office, Americans will wake up at last, as they never could have under the anodyne Gore...
...And in the end, it backfired...
...Al Gore cost me the election," Ralph Nader said the morning after at the National DISSENT / Spring 2001 n 95 righteousness of a guru...
...Simple arithmetic shows, however, that despite the poor campaign and despite the Republican thievery, Gore clearly would have won the election had Nader backed off...
...His stated goal is "To keep the two parties in Washington more honest"—but that is marginality speaking...
...Myth: A Nader vote was important in order to build up popular support for the Greens so that they could get to 5 percent and therefore receive federal funds in 2004...
...The departing Bill Clinton signed executive orders that will protect fiftyeight million acres of federally owned land from the depredations of the timber, mining, and energy industries...
...Then what...
...SEAN WILENTL teaches at Princeton...
...And even so, with your eyes fixed on the rearview mirror—the New Deal, the movements of the sixties—you counseled others to make a vote they could be proud of...
...But in the American winner-take-all presidential system—which is not going away—the payoff of a third-party effort is the chance to be a spoiler again...
...The risk of this result was always apparent, and Nader did nothing to suggest that he thought it negligible...
Vol. 48 • April 2001 • No. 2
