Memo: To: Those Who Supported the Nader Campaign: Responds
Willis, Ellen
IVOTED FOR Ralph Nader for several intertwined reasons. At a time when both major parties and the culture's conventional wisdom uncritically embrace corporate power and free-market ideology, I...
...The Nader campaign, in contrast, was based on the idea that the hegemonic corporatism espoused by the major parties was 98 n DISSENT / Spring 2001 preventing oppositional ideas from reaching the American people in the first place...
...It's this last point, especially, that drives Todd Gitlin and Sean Wilentz berserk: they devote a lot of space to arguing that the Demo96 n DISSENT / Spring 2001 crats and the Republicans are not the same...
...I believe Gore's "populist moment" helped him, and would have elected him if he'd had the nerve to persist...
...It's one thing to lose, another to be structurally trapped in a losing game...
...On the contrary, I usually vote for Democrats who are running against conservative Republicans—at the same time that I voted for Nader for president, I voted, albeit with little enthusiasm, for Hillary Clinton for senator...
...Al Gore discouraged his supporters from getting out in the streets of Florida, while Republicans showed up en masse...
...In dismissing out of hand hopes that the campaign would attract disaffected nonvoters, Gitlin and Wilentz miss the point: it's not that there is a crowd of ready-made leftists out there, but that people who are bored and alienated by the vacuity of politics as usual may be open to a left critique...
...It means that things will get worse...
...I believe that by articulating and fighting for a radical and, yes, utopian social vision, it's possible to move people, to change their minds, and at the very least move the center toward the left...
...That's in part because of my own indelible political experience of agitating for women's liberation in the late sixties, when 99 percent of Americans were to the right of us (including the men of the New Left), and living to see ideas that once seemed outrageously radical become conventional wisdom, taken for granted even by women who won't call themselves feminists...
...But if they do not have the confidence to fight for their own beliefs, how can they persuade anyone else—and thereby move the center toward them...
...DISSENT / Spring 2001 n 99...
...What's wrong with this picture...
...This is a recipe for paralysis...
...The last DISSENT / Spring 2001 n 97 ARGUMENTS several decades have clearly shown that without a strong left to counter a determined right, the center does not hold...
...they accuse those of us who won't get with their program not only of political error, but of serious character defects...
...for even when the Democrats rule, the country will continue to drift rightward, if more slowly...
...Nor do I believe "the worse the better," whatever "a Nader voter in Portland" may think (Gitlin and Wilentz may be adept at seeing differences between Republicans and Democrats, but recognizing distinctions among Nader supporters is not their strong point...
...Irritating as it is to hear the argument from Eric Alterman, who has made a career of dismissing cultural issues as "identity politics," it's true that despite numerous pleas by supporters, Nader would not stretch himself to connect with constituencies beyond his young-white-guy core...
...How do Gitlin and Wilentz propose to make the Democrats "more green, more labor-friendly, less punitive" if we reflexively vote for them no matter what they do...
...Conservative Republicans hang together, stand up for their beliefs, and police the "moderates" in their ranks, while the Democrats' every impulse is toward compromise and appeasement...
...To begin with, tens of millions of Americans are to the left of Al Gore...
...I don't see electoral politics as the only, or even the primary, arena for movement-building...
...It strikes me that Gitlin and Wilentz protest a bit too much...
...For Gitlin and Wilentz, all this is empty rationalization: Nader was a spoiler, pure and simple...
...As they see it, 95 percent of Americans are to the right of the Greens, therefore a majority of people must agree with the center-right (at best), therefore the only responsible course for leftists is to vote Democratic...
...Yet they have far less influence on Democratic leadership and policy making than the smaller Christian right has on the Republicans...
...They are banging on an open door, in my case...
...Anything else is "utopian," in their lexicon a synonym for all the above-mentioned malfeasances...
...Why is this so obviously out of the question...
...Its extreme fringe regularly overreaches and loses, but in the process makes the Bushes and Cheneys look "reasonable," "mainstream," even moderate...
...Gitlin and Wilentz also invoke past experience, but their appraisal of the current situation is rooted in a skewed reading of 1968 and its lessons...
...I hoped that getting enough support to qualify for federal funds would help the Green Party to build on the momentum of the Seattle protest and become an influential force in national politics...
...And without a radical left to provide ideas and conviction, liberals are on the defensive, constantly attacked by the right as an irrelevant leftist fringe till they themselves come to believe that they must "move toward the center" to survive...
...There's a conundrum here that Democratic apologists like Gitlin and Wilentz do not address...
...Nader supporters also hoped that he would push Gore to the left, and Gore did respond for a half-hearted nanosecond...
...We have just been through a campaign in which George W. Bush pretended to be a moderate, lost the popular vote anyway, and stole the electoral vote with the connivance of Republicans everywhere from the Florida state house to the U. S. Supreme Court...
...When they're in the minority, they essentially give up the battlefield and let the Republicans get away with murder...
...Democratic senators refused to filibuster the Ashcroft nomination, though they could have defeated it, and passed Gale Norton as secretary of the interior without blinking...
...The right is radical and, if you will, utopian, fighting passionately for its belief in untrammeled capitalism and social authoritarianism...
...There is no way to combat this pernicious political dynamic without taking risks...
...Even if they still don't vote, they may start listening...
...When Democrats are in power, they move to the right under pressure from Republicans, stiffing their core constituencies in the confidence that the left has nowhere else to go...
...In truth, my vote was as much a matter of weighing tradeoffs and compromises—always the coin of electoral politics—as many Gore votes were...
...In other words, the Democrats' own spinelessness helps to create the conditions that make liberals and leftists feel compelled to keep voting for them despite the likelihood, if not certainty, of betrayal...
...Furthermore, Nader was hardly my ideal candidate...
...Which is to say that Nader undoubtedly gained votes for Gore—perhaps as many as he lost, perhaps even more...
...I admit I was surprised at how quickly their postFlorida indignation faded, but I shouldn't have been...
...THE BEST WAY to understand my position is to look at the Democrats' modus operandi since the election...
...In this vein, some congressional Republicans have demanded even steeper tax cuts than Bush's extravagant figure, inspiring the following headline in the New York Times (February 9, 2001): "Happily in the Middle: As Debate Rages About Tax Cuts, Bush Plan Takes on Mainstream Air...
...Ironically, the tone of their polemic—which I have to say is typical of the anti-Naderites I've heard from—replicates the self-righteous moralism they profess to abhor...
...If our sole criterion for political choices is to keep things from getting worse, we will be forever caught in the double bind I've described...
...This does not simply ensure stalemate...
...Why, for instance, risk the appointment of Supreme Court justices who might overturn Roe v. Wade, among other things...
...Gore, rather than making some mild gesture toward the liberal wing of his party, actually went to the right to choose a running mate...
...Besides, they cut into Gore's popular vote (though why that matters I don't know, since the Democrats have so politely refrained from using the popular vote as a weapon...
...Yet in an election so freakily close, one can second-guess all sorts of decisions that led to small shifts in voting: if Gore had let Clinton campaign in Arkansas, if the Democrats in Palm Beach had been more savvy about ballot design, and so on...
...Anyway, the real problem with the radical left of that period was not that it rejected Humphrey, but that it wrote off the American people and succumbed to the solipsistic, destructive fantasy of waging guerrilla war against them in behalf of third world revolutionaries...
...Someone has to get up and loudly, publicly insist that declarations of the end of history are premature, and this time the one with the megaphone was Ralph Nader...
...And like Gitlin and Wilentz, I'd rather live under the center-right party...
...Instead, they are determined to be statesmanlike, bipartisan, and respectful of the system, which is to say supine...
...It's far from clear that Hubert Humphrey would have ended the war, nor could he have reversed the conservativepopulist backlash that gave George Wallace 13 percent of the vote...
...Wheeling out the heavy artillery (Gandhi, Dostoyevsky, et al...
...Even the conciliatory "strategic voters" are excoriated for being inconsistent...
...I'd say it's because the "center" is not a fixed location—it shifts depending on how hard and how effectively each "end" pulls it...
...GITLIN AND WILENTZ have a static view of the electorate and the political spectrum...
...The Democrats have half the seats in the Senate and are barely outnumbered in the House, which is enough power to constantly remind Bush of his lack of a mandate and keep him from doing real damage...
...At a time when both major parties and the culture's conventional wisdom uncritically embrace corporate power and free-market ideology, I felt it was important to support a nationally visible challenge to that consensus...
...Under Jimmy Carter and Clinton as well as Reagan and Bush pere, deregulation, devolution of the welfare state, the triumph of the plutocrats, and the erosion of civil rights and liberties—abortion rights included— proceeded as if ineluctable...
...The radical left, in contrast, barely exists as the source of an alternative vision of society, let alone a militant force for promoting that vision...
...The real question is whether it's possible to break out of our present stifling alternatives and create space for a left—or whether any effort to do so is by definition an exercise in thoughtlessness, delusion, irresponsibility, feelgood cultishness, pride, self-righteousness, allergy to democracy, sectarian purism, and moral fanaticism...
...When they insist that it's all about the Democrats, and only about the Democrats, are they trying to convince us—or themselves...
...the Democratic Party could not survive without them and their organizations...
...Would he have even considered appointing the liberal equivalent of John Ashcroft as attorney general...
...As I write, Democrats in both houses appear to be folding on tax cuts...
...In singling out Nader's Florida votes as the culprit, Gitlin and Wilentz merely assume what they set out to prove: that although mistakes in strategy by the major parties may be unfortunate, voting for a third party is inherently illegitimate...
...Finally—or perhaps first of all—I am convinced that if the left is to revive, it must break from its masochistic, unrequited loyalty to the Democratic Party...
...He said not a word about the scandalous disenfranchisement of black voters...
...If anything, their behavior suggests that they are threatened by the potential power of such mass constituencies as labor, blacks, and women, and would rather lose than risk unleashing it...
...After all, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas would not be on the Supreme Court without help from Democrats, and Democrats collaborated in passing Ronald Reagan's ruinous tax cuts (Bill Bradley was even co-author of the 1986 "reforms...
...Why then was I willing to risk a Bush victory...
...Black Democrats in the House could not find one senator to join their objection to the Bush electors (not even Paul Wellstone, who then had the gall to editorialize in the Nation that Democrats should resist pressure to "operate from the center...
...But in the absence of forceful opposition to the repressively narrow boundaries of what passes for mainstream campaign "debate," those boundaries are seen as defining politics itself: the idea that nothing is possible beyond the most trivial gestures toward dealing with our social problems becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy...
...The two parties are not the same—one is a center-right party, the other a far-right party...
...ELLEN WILLIS directs the Cultural Reporting and Criticism Program at New York University and is a fellow of the Nation Institute...
Vol. 48 • April 2001 • No. 2
