The ‘Nader Problem’ in a Broader Perspective

Column No. 35

By Steven Jonas, MD, MPH - October 21, 2004

A friend sent me a comment on the upcoming election from a just-retired senior government department employee, certainly strongly anti-Bush, but concerned about what a Kerry Administration might mean for the country as well.  As my friend said, the comment speaks volumes.  I have paraphrased it here.

“I have been involved with education all of my life.  It happens too that I have been concerned from the beginning of the Bush Administration’s term with the influence that the thinking (if you can call it that) of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) has on its policies.  I felt that if our countrymen understood the agenda of the current administration, which comes right out of PNAC, we perhaps could do something about obstructing their objectives.

“In regard of the upcoming election, I am very concerned that, should he become President, in substance, although certainly not style, Senator Kerry’s foreign and domestic policies won’t differ that much from Bush’s.  I have been reading in several left-wing journals that tell this to their readers.  These writings have led me to believe that even if Kerry is elected, we have a heck of a job ahead of us if we think for one minute that a Kerry win will give us our nation back.  Although he would appoint reasonably-minded judges, would pay more attention to environmental preservation, try to do something about health care and education, show some concern about the preservation of civil liberties, and have a markedly less confrontational and aggressive foreign policy, he still will, these journals and their writers say, ultimately be beholden to corporate interests in the United States.

“This is, of course, pretty much what Ralph Nader says when he tells us that there is no difference between Kerry and Bush, and that, therefore, people who really want to make a change in our country should vote for him.  Thom Hartman's ‘We the People’ explains quite succinctly how Corporations became ‘persons’ and why this is not a good idea for the human beings who are living their lives on this planet, especially the ones who inhabit this nation.  I know all about Bush, but if these analysts are correct, in the long run there really isn’t that much difference between him and Kerry so why not go with Nader in trying something new?”

My friend asked me for advice on how to answer this friend of his.  This is what I suggested to him.

Here's an alternate response to the "Nader Question" that your friend raises that I have developed.  See what you think.  The usual response begins with “But there is really is a difference, a huge one.  Let me count the ways.”  However, let us for the sake of argument grant everything that these Nader-leaning folks say, that there is really no, or very little, difference between Kerry and Bush.  To begin with, this is like saying that there was very little difference between Roosevelt and Hoover, they were both capitalists, so why vote for either one, or that, in Philip Roth's account of the 1940 election, there was very little difference between Roosevelt and Lindbergh.  So what if one was anti-Semite, they were both capitalists.  Obviously, there is a good deal to dispute on the facts of that statement, but let us even grant it as a premise.  Then the following issues and questions arise:

1.    Nader will not win.  Nader is not now and never has been, even when he was the Green Party's standard-bearer, a political organizer.  (Now it happens that he has been even cast out by the Green Party.)  Thus, granting that his goals are both laudable (I would grant much but not all of that) and achievable in America in the foreseeable future (I would not grant that), and given that achieving them would require a long-range political plan, money, and a huge amount of very hard work, what positive purpose will be achieved by voting for him, knowing that he is no political organizer, totally lacking in any of the necessary skills for building an alternate political movement?

2.    The Nader vote could very well tip the election to Bush.  While people like your friend and the left-wing magazines she reads believe that there is not any real difference between them, the Kerry voters and the Democratic Party do think, very strongly, that differences are there.  How would a Bush victory in this context help Nader both promote his ideas and organize (well, not Nader himself, but like-minded thinkers) in the Democratic Party and among the Kerry voters, Democrat and non-Democrat alike?

3.            Let's say that in a second Bush term, the country slides into Depression, and/or has a major credit collapse, public and private, and/or moves steadily in the direction of concentration of governmental power in the hands of the Executive Branch which then uses that power to crush dissent, and/or the Iraq crisis turns into the Iraq Disaster (of one kind or another), and/or you name it, the results of known Bush policies.  In addition, let us say that it would be the Nader vote that will have caused Bush to get in, or at least that is what the public perceives would have taken place.  What then happens to Nader's ideas and the possibility of promoting them?

4.             Let's say that Kerry wins, despite the Nader vote.  How much traction would Nader and his followers, and even the Green Party, tarred by the Nader brush, have in a Kerry Administration?  Who would give them the time of day?  I would not, and I happen to like many of their ideas.  Would that be a good outcome for the future of their good ideas, much less Nader personally as an influencer of policy?

5.            On the future of the Democratic Party, win or lose this time around.  For many years, well before 2000, Nader has carried no weight with me because he refused to work within the Democratic Party to try to change it.  He offered no plan for trying to get it back to its progressive New Deal roots, for using that heritage of the modern party to get it to offer real alternative policies to those of the Republican and their friends in the DLC.

Nader’s claim has always been that he wanted to change the Party, not create a "third force" or third party.  Well, you do not change a party by working outside of it.  You change it, as Howard Dean already has done in spades in two short years, by working inside it.  You change it by organizing, by raising money for its progressive wing, by supporting its lesser-office candidates who are progressives, by working on philosophy, ideology and platform in the off years, and so and so forth.  Nader has done none of this and has shown himself incapable of doing any of it.  Nor does his campaign this time around offer the prospect of leaving any structure in place for working, in whatever way one can think of, to change the Democratic Party.  Nader's statements seem to indicate that the Party should change its positions on various issues because he says they should.  I wonder if your friend really takes such a position seriously and thinks that Ralph Nader and like-minded people can really affect change this way.

6.            Finally, does anyone seriously think that, for the foreseeable future, anyone who is not well-connected with the corporate power elite in this country is going to be elected President?  What in my view many people do not realize is that at this time, with no strong anti-capitalist working class organizations in place, the corporate elite is hardly unified.  Just look at how they are lining up on the two different sides in the present election.  There are major splits among them on how best to govern the country and indeed on what the role of government in a capitalist country is, precisely.

Further, as readers of  these columns know, I think that there are huge differences between Kerry and the Georgites on such fundamental questions as what Constitutional Democracy means here at home, much less in Iraq.  I have written more than once in this space about how The Patriot Act, among other things, vitiates the Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments, and how the proposed “gay marriage amendment” would eliminate the equal protection clause of the 14th.  The Patriot Act substitutes the Rule of Man for the Rule of Law, and doing so constitutes the essence of fascism.  Just how far does my friend’s correspondent, and the analysts she is presently listening to, think the “process of progressive change” in this country could go were the Georgites to really get their way in dealing with dissent, just the way they have already told us they want to.  They would do this through their use of The Patriot Act, with their newly-appointed in-pocket Federal judiciary that couldn’t wait to have the chance to give them these powers, in a second term.

In summary, granting everything that Nader and his left-wing allies say how would anything that Nader is doing or could, given his make-up, possibly do, help the progressive cause.  (Funnily enough, it is now coming out that Nader has received significant contributions from Republicans and he knows of the sources.)  No, I am afraid that if we want to create a truly progressive Democratic Party in this country, we are going to have to do much better than Ralph Nader, in every sense of the term.