Ralph Nader's latest run

...The Remnant That Does Not Save How consequential Nader's decision will prove to be is, of course, unknowable...

...If reality was going to be in such poor form as to disconfirm their belief, they would find a way to make belief and reality match...

...What these figures suggest is the existence of salvationist circles in American life, not unlike the psychological descendants of sixteenth6 n DISSENT / Spring 2004 century Protestant millenarians, whose members believe that they constitute a saving remnant...

...La troisieme partie, c'est moi...

...Rejection is the proof of their righteousness...

...He has no independent organization to speak of...

...Researchers infiltrated the group and waited to see what would happen...

...Came the designated day, the landscape remained dry, no saucers landed, and how did the believers respond...

...It's especially peculiar to think that these nonvoters are waiting for him at a time when turnout has actually risen, sometimes impressively, in almost every primary and caucus so far this year...

...With the world lost in darkness, they carry the torch on behalf of the silenced, neglected, and marginalized...

...But Nader is running this time as an independent...

...TODD GITLIN is a professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University and the author, most recently, of Letters to a Young Activist...

...He cerCOMMENTS & OPINIONS tainly didn't increase turnout among blacks or any other minority...

...This year he adds a new enemy: "the liberal intelligentsia" who, he admits, tried to talk him out of his intent to run as an independent this year...

...He needs thousands of signatures to get on state ballots...

...They are not bashful saints or hidden leftists biding their time until a candidate appears with the precisely correct political position...

...The Phantom Nonvoters Nader, of course, has grander designs than a fraction of his previous fraction...

...If New Hampshire had gone for Gore, he could have lost Florida and still have carried the Electoral College...

...But leaving aside inconvenient facts, if you take a hard look at the turnout argument, you see that the legions of nonvoters are a spectral cavalry, always imagined to be marking time in the canyons until they are summoned to rescue the good guys...

...A number of them fell away...

...Nader invoked them in 2000...

...It's not funny...

...Everyone knows that Nader received 97,488 votes in Florida when Bush officially carried the state by 537 votes...

...But as in similar cases of millenarian prophecy over previous centuries, there remained a core of fanatics who, having already turned their lives upside down to conform to the prophecy, took courage from the support they found in their group...

...The Green Party, say what you will, has a fund-raising base...

...Their passion confirms their truth...

...What they are not looking for is a prophet or a new party...

...If those who suffer most from corporate domination were susceptible to Nader's appeal, why was his black vote in 2000 so puny—only 1 percent in Washington, D. C., for example, where Nader won 5 percent overall...

...Here's a headline you didn't see in 2000 but remains evergreen in 2004: "Nader Undermined Minorities...

...Thus does the book that emerged from this research, When Prophecy Fails, by Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter, published in 1956, anticipate Ralph Nader—except that Nader has more data at his disposal and therefore must be counted as more reckless in his disregard for the all-tooreal world in which George W Bush and his crowd have taken power over every important institution of American politics in behalf of preventive war, plutocracy, environmental meltdown, cultural rollback, and a judiciary that ratifies all the above...

...The Nation urged him not to run...

...Now these doubters are demoted to the status of pixel-pushers...

...Will he headquarter his campaign in Roswell, N.M...

...they have real needs...

...Quixotic Nader, whose first run was tragedy, now tries farce...

...This small band of Americans believed that on a particular date soon to come, the world would be engulfed by a flood of biblical proportions—but also that, on the very same day, flying saucers would arrive and rescue the true believers...

...To the struggle against "corporate-occupied territory," Nader now offers only himself, the one-man crusader who whines that his critics want to deprive him of a fundamental right, the right to run...

...Florida, New Hampshire, and New Mexico are only three of the states where even a badly weakened Nader might make a difference comparable to his decisive margin in 2000...

...They are disproportionately low-income and younger people who, if they want anything from politics, want practical results...

...It's less well known that Nader won 22,198 votes in New Hampshire, which Bush carried by 7,211 votes...

...Over the months leading up to his February announcement, Nader consulted many environmentalists and consumer advocates— some of them groomed by him in past decades...

...Will state Green parties endorse him and give him their ballot lines...

...Are they rejected by the mainstream, the establishment, the gravely unenlightened...

...Strikingly, Nader's 2.74 percent is almost exactly what California's Green Party candidate, Peter Camejo, drew in the strange California gubernatorial race of 2003...

...In 2000, there were Republicans who came to the aid of local Green candidacies...

...Who will pay for his outreach to the phantom masses...

...Investigations would be welcome...

...There is a permanent margin Nader speaks to, and it is hardly negligible...

...The difference-maker of 2000 again declares himself the one-man answer to "the twoparty duopoly," a status quo in which "both parties flunk . . . one with a D-, the Republicans...

...Their cynicism about politics is self-interested...

...The term is code for activists who disagree with him...

...He has gone into flying saucer territory...

...It's not well known, either, that Nader won 20,219 votes in New Mexico, where Gore just barely beat Bush by 64 votes...

...This is the logic of left-wing sectarians, especially on campuses, where they don't have to talk to many people drastically unlike themselves, let alone win support from anyone else, to feel secure in their rectitude...

...They are the argument of last resort in all political fantasies...

...The worse things look on the plane of practical calculation, the more intensely they need to rededicate themselves to the mission...

...Equally strikingly, the 2003 annual survey of first-year college students across the nation, conducted by UCLA's Higher Education Research Institute, showed 2.9 percent of the nation's freshmen classifying themselves as far left—a figure almost identical to the 2.8 percent who so classified themselves in the banner radical year 1970...

...Will Karl Rove and his fund-raising rangers limit their celebration of Nader's candidacy to champagne...

...But there is no evidence that nonvoters differ from voters in any ideological way...

...A Green vote was a luxury that could only be afforded by those who didn't need politics to defend their material interests...

...Pyromania or Self-immolation...

...What will happen this time...

...If they could win converts in a second round of proselytizing, they would confirm the wisdom they had demonstrated in the first...

...But even a third of that vote might still tip a state or two...

...All in all, Nader's announcement ratified his position as an unforgettable figure in American history, but whether his candidacy is pyromania or self-immolation isn't yet clear...

...Back when he approved of these people, he did not pigeonhole them...

...They stuck to their guns, reinterpreted the data in such a way as to justify the commitments they had already undertaken, and intensified their proselytizing efforts...

...An earlier and shorter version of this article appeared on Salon.com . DISSENT / Spring 2004 n 7...

...Nader's narcissism has metastasized to such proportions that he came forward all alone to announce his candidacy without being able to brandish a single one of the celebrities who surrounded him in 2000 and gave him a certain cachet with the young—not Michael Moore, not Tim Robbins or Susan Sarandon, not Patti Smith...

...When all is said and done, what Nader's decision amounts to is not logic but an exercise in monomania on the part of a man who once accomplished great things and now believes that whatever he claims to accomplish is great by virtue of the fact that he claims it...

...This time around, Nader cannot even offer the Green Party, whose national nomination he disdained to seek (though he is free to try to avail himself of their positions on many state ballots...

...Petitioning is an expensive business...

...Howard Dean urged his followers not to bolt from the Democrats...

...So much for his argument four years ago about third parties and their indispensability in American history and in politics today...

...Of course, these are self-identifications, and what it means to be far left in 2003 is presumably different (less Maoist, anyway) than in 1970...

...one with a D+, the Democrats...

...He started late...

...In fact, Nader's base is a sliver of upper-middleclass whites—"the liberal intelligentsia," you might say—disproportionately located in such states as Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and New Hampshire with the smallest black populations...

...Howard Dean invoked them this year...

...Who will collect signatures for his petitions...

...he viewed them as DISSENT / Spring 2004 n 5 COMMENTS & OPINIONS the people's tribunes, the indefatigable heroes of a popular movement...

...Making his announcement, he referred to the "100 million nonvoters" he thinks he can speak to...

...Judging from anti-Nader Web sites, open letters from former supporters, critiques in the Nation, the Progressive, the New York Times, and elsewhere, Nader can scarcely take for granted the 2.74 percent of the voters he attracted in 2000...