Memo: To: Those Who Supported the Nader Campaign: Reply
Wilentz, Sean & Gitlin, Todd
I 4 ET US TAKE Ellen Willis's argument at its strongest points—something she does not do with ours. The core of her response is that supporting "a nationally visible challenge" to the corporate...
...Instead, she professes faith, nothing more, in a repetition of radical and utopian ideas...
...Willis is dead right that the Democrats have been supine in the first months after the election...
...Tens of millions of Democrats may stand DISSENT / Spring 2001 n 99 to Gore's left, but disproportionately they live in California, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and a few other states, where they also elect senators and representatives...
...100 • DISSENT / Spring 2001...
...It was also decisive, as GOP operatives from Karl Rove on down have gleefully pointed out...
...Telling ordinary Americans that it's necessary for them to suffer while we, the righteous, wait for them to wise up and "build the movement" is contemptuous of the lives of real people—not just in the United States, by the way, but wherever melting ice caps raise sea levels, thanks to an American government directed by oil company executives...
...They would quiver less if the left mobilized voters, demonstrating political muscle in the Congress—which can be done if we work in the Democratic Party, but simply cannot be done outside it...
...Jeb Bush, Katherine Harris, and the Republican firm she hired to throw black Florida voters off the registration lists...
...But why minimize Ralph Nader's contribution...
...Where is the evidence for this wishful thinking...
...Ergo, to win nationally, the Democrats must be a coalition party...
...We itemized some differences...
...Willis does nothing to show that Nader and his backers deserve exemption from responsibility—and, in the eyes of Dissent's readers, from shame...
...We are skeptical about faith-based politics of all stripes...
...The others live in the rest of the country...
...She does not address Teixeira's arguments, or anyone else's...
...In the meantime, the practical, material consequences of the Bush election are dreadful for actual people...
...In a recent Dissent article ("Fool's Gold of the Left," Summer 2000), Ruy Teixeira argued persuasively against the fantasy that nonvoters think differently from voters...
...But perhaps she is not really outraged, because what more could be expected of what she calls a corrupt "centerright" party...
...Willis may think we are banging on an open door so far as she is concerned, but so far as Ralph Nader is concerned, that door is nailed shut...
...But honesty compels her to acknowledge weak links with "may" and "possible," as in, the bored and alienated "may be open to a left critique . . . . may start listening . . .it's possible to move people...
...Willis evades the problem...
...In the 172 years since modern American parties have fought out elections, the Democrats have been able to win two consecutive terms only four times—Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and Bill Clinton...
...If the Greens were ever a party that could command more than 2 1/2 percent of the vote, they would have to be a coalition party, too...
...We share her outrage...
...Bush barged into the White House helped by a host of factors—the antidemocratic bullying of the Supreme Court...
...The largely successful women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s—which benefited from twelve years of Democratic presidencies—is greatly outnumbered by many fervent reform efforts that have failed, especially when Democrats are out of power in Washington...
...This speaks to the weakness of the center-left historically, an unhappy fact that cannot be wiped aside by invoking the great and glorious 1960s...
...If we also claim the Republican Abraham Lincoln as a progressive president—and we do— look what happened to him...
...The core of her response is that supporting "a nationally visible challenge" to the corporate consensus helps "movement-building," which in turn promotes "dealing with our social problems...
...and the ineptitude of the Democrats, not least their own Palm Beach County election commissioner Theresa LaPorte...
...While the Republicans stopped at nothing to slip their stumbling pretender into the White House, the Democratic leadership quivered...
Vol. 48 • April 2001 • No. 2
