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http://www.tnr.com/052900/judis052900.html
THE NEW REPUBLIC / JUNE 5, 2000
RALPH NADER BETRAYS HIMSELF
by John B. Judis
On a drizzly May afternoon in Detroit, Michigan, Ralph Nader is standing before about 100 supporters. His graying hair tousled, his features gnarled with age, the Green Party presidential hopeful launches into an attack on his new favorite target, Vice President Al Gore. "What is the difference between Bush and Gore on corporate issues?" Nader asks. "I'll grant you, on civil rights issues and social service, there is a difference. But, on the big issue of whether our corporate government is going to take over our political government in Washington, you know what the difference is. The difference is the velocity with which their knees hit the floor when the corporations come knocking at the door."
Today in Detroit, as he will tonight in Madison, Wisconsin, and tomorrow in Raleigh and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Nader speaks extemporaneously for an hour and then takes questions. He makes the same general indictment each time--that we have "lost control of our lives to the corporations"--and illustrates the point with disquisitions on how the owners of professional sports teams fleece cities, how agribusiness boycotts industrial hemp, and how the 1872 Mining Act cheats Americans out of their natural heritage. The audiences sit in rapt attention; afterward, they crowd the stage to enlist as volunteers.
Invariably, someone asks Nader how he justifies a campaign that could take enough votes from Gore to hand the election to Texas Governor George W. Bush. Nader responds that on key economic issues there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans or between Gore and Bush. "Both parties are subordinating their obligations to represent the American people to global corporations who have no allegiance to our country and no allegiance to community," he says in Detroit. In an interview with the editors of an alternative newspaper in Chapel Hill, he charges that Gore "speaks with chattering teeth and forked tongue. He is a coward from top to bottom."
In Detroit, Nader says his goal "is to build a new progressive political party that says to the Democratic Party, `If you don't shape up, you're going to ship out.'" Asked in Chapel Hill whether he can actually win, he all but admits that's not his real goal. "Do you really want a Pat Buchanan answer--about what I will do when I am president?" Nader says, laughing. "The truth is you can't lose. You bring thousands of people into the progressive political community. That's a win. If you get five percent, you get federal funds the next time. You cost the Democrats a few states. They'll never be the same again."
He may be right. When Nader ran for president as the Green Party candidate in 1996, he did not even campaign. He spent less than $5,000 and got on the ballot in only a handful of states. Yet he still managed to win enough votes in one state (Colorado) to tilt it from Bill Clinton to Bob Dole. This year, Nader is running in earnest. He plans to get on the ballot in at least 45 states. He hopes to raise $5 million, and he just might--given that he can draw on the Hollywood left, trial lawyers, and a direct-mail network built up over many years. (In just six weeks as a candidate, he's raised nearly $350,000.) Already, Nader is getting five percent in national polls; in California, he gets close to ten percent.
To cost Gore the election, Nader needs three to five percent of the vote in a few closely contested states: Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Wisconsin, Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. And that's a real possibility. In the past, Nader's jeremiads against corporations, his difficult, detail-packed speeches, his rumpled suits, and his folder of clippings have appealed primarily to the activist left. But this year, in the wake of Minnesota Governor Jesse Ventura and Arizona Senator John McCain, Nader may also appeal to the unattached and alienated quarter of the electorate that sees both the GOP and the Democrats as controlled by "special interests" and that responds to candidates who represent a break from "politics as usual," regardless of their ideology.
In short, 2000 may be the year Ralph Nader has been waiting for his whole career. But, for someone like myself who has for years admired Nader as a champion of workers and consumers, this campaign does not represent the culmination of his life's work. It represents its betrayal. For the last four decades, the gangly Nader has loomed large in American politics precisely because, unlike so many other radicals, he has not merely ranted about the system. He's actually tried to fix it. He founded the modern consumer movement; he played a critical role in getting government to pay attention to automobile safety, environmental pollution, and workers' health and protection. Most recently, he helped inspire the government antitrust suit against Microsoft.
As a candidate this year, by contrast, Nader seems determined, even eager, to play a destructive role. His campaign bears the mark of the Manichaean left. He doesn't merely criticize corporate power; he turns it into a bogeyman and elevates the struggle with corporations into an apocalyptic conflict between good and evil. He primarily attacks not conservatives but Democrats, who share many of his objectives. And he promotes the classic sectarian canard: that by undermining the politician immediately to his right, namely Al Gore, he can bring about the victory of a purer left.
Nader's sectarianism is most apparent in his current rhetoric about the market. In the past, Nader avoided the left's doctrinaire opposition to capitalism per se. The son of a restaurant owner, Nader was not a socialist but a democratic pluralist who wanted workers and consumers to balance--rather than overwhelm--the power of business. While Students for a Democratic Society called for world revolution, Nader, designated as one of the Junior Chamber of Commerce's outstanding young men in 1966, was lobbying Congress to pass the Wholesale Meat Act and the Natural Gas Pipeline Safety Act. He seemed to understand that the competitive market and the corporate form of business organization, which facilitates investment, have helped fuel America's spectacular economic growth. He also acknowledged that corporations and corporate leaders could act for good as well as ill. As a result, Nader enjoyed the support of some small businessmen and even of a select group of progressive corporate executives and bankers who understood he was more reformer than revolutionary.
But, in this campaign, Nader is more revolutionary than reformer. He has adopted the radical left's demonology, describing corporations as "operationally evil" or as "monsters." He also blames business leaders and corporations for every ill of the past 200 years, including some for which, quite plainly, they were not solely or principally responsible. Nader told students at the University of Wisconsin, "It was the industrialists who didn't want women to have the vote." That's misleading at best. Business leaders were divided on suffrage, as were women and workers. And the major national business organizations took no position on the issue. But Nader is not interested in facts. He is looking at the history of business through the prism of the sectarian left.
Think I'm overstating? Nader also told students in Madison how multinational corporations "roam the world ... cutting contracts with companies to take brutalized child labor in the hundreds of millions." By current estimates, there are about 250 million child laborers, but only five percent of them work in export industries. Nader is off by 2,000 percent or more. In addition, Nader told students that "the business community in this country had slaves for three hundred years." I guess those Whig businessmen in the North don't count. And he told them that the Gap "sourced out to nine-, ten-, eleven-, twelve-, thirteen-year-olds in brutal child labor abroad." In June 1995, the National Labor Committee accused the Gap of buying goods from a Salvadorean factory employing 14- to 17-year-olds. The Gap agreed to stop doing it.
Nader's sectarianism is just as apparent in his selective history of the Democratic Party. Since the mid-'70s, business--organized through lobbies, law firms, and policy groups and allied with conservative Republicans--has had the upper hand in Washington. Whenever Democrats have directly challenged the distribution of wealth and power--through bills to reform labor law, establish a consumer-protection agency, or even contain hospital costs--business lobbies have beaten them. Business has also rolled back many of the regulatory gains that Nader and congressional liberals achieved in the early '70s. As of 1997, the Consumer Product Safety Commission employed 43 percent fewer people than it did in 1974, just two years after its establishment. As of this year, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration has 23 percent fewer employees than it did 20 years ago.
The relevant question, though, is whether the Democrats are as responsible for these setbacks as the Republicans. Nader says they are, charging that "the corporatists" have taken over the Democratic Party and that under Clinton and Gore "the right-wing gains are worse than under Reagan and Bush." When I pressed him for evidence that the Democrats were even more pliant than the Republicans, he referred me to a study of osha by Public Citizen, an organization he founded, that shows, he said, that the agency fared worse under Clinton than it did during the Bush administration. The study, which covers from 1972 to 1998, does show that osha inspections declined during the Clinton administration, particularly from 1994 to 1996, the years in which the Republicans won control of Congress. But, according to Peg Seminario, director of the afl-cio's department of occupational safety and health, that decline in enforcement was due to dramatic reductions in personnel in 1995 and 1996--reductions made as the result of budget cuts dictated by the new GOP Congress. Since then, however, freed from the extreme spending reductions imposed to combat the deficit, the Clinton administration has successfully restored osha's spending and staff. In fact, in 1999, which is not included in the Public Citizen study, spending has increased rather dramatically--by more than eight percent.
The Clinton administration's management of the Environmental Protection Agency is a similar story. According to Gregory Whetstone of the Natural Resources Defense Council, the EPA under Clinton has been "far more aggressive" than it was under Bush and Reagan. "Comparatively speaking, this EPA has been very effective," Whetstone says. Indeed, while the president did accede to corporate pressure on many occasions, Nader's contention that the Clinton administration has been less protective of workers and consumers than were the Reagan and Bush administrations is self-serving and untrue.
Sectarianism equally colors Nader's view of Gore. The vice president, of course, has not proved to be an enormously effective candidate. But Nader is not merely contemptuous of his tactics; he is contemptuous of Gore's character, too, calling him the "consummate political coward" and a "coward from top to bottom." As with Clinton, Nader insists on turning Gore into a caricature. In fact, while his overall record is mixed, Gore has at times bucked business on risky votes. In 1978, the Business Roundtable specifically targeted Gore, then a second-term congressman from a fairly conservative Tennessee district, as part of its lobbying campaign against Nader's bill for a consumer-protection agency. Although the House defeated the measure, Gore voted for it. Gore also supported public financing of elections, not a popular position in Tennessee. And, although Gore came from a right-to-work state, he maintained a consistently pro-labor voting record. (The AFL-CIO gave him close to a 90 percent rating during his tenure in the Senate.)
Nader charges that Gore, while serving under Clinton, acquiesced to a deal that allowed auto companies to forgo increases in fuel-economy standards in return for constructing new "clean cars." The administration can be faulted for not raising fuel standards, but no such deal has been revealed. Clinton and Gore did back the "clean car" project, which has yet to deliver, but so did many liberals and environmentalists. Within the administration, Gore took the lead in fighting for the global-warming treaty, which was opposed by a powerful business coalition and by most Republicans in Congress. Unlike other New Democrats, he has also staunchly opposed even modest Social Security privatization, a Wall Street favorite. By contrast, George W. Bush, the man Nader seems happy to help elect, has already promised that, as president, he would champion legislation to restrict consumers' power to sue corporations and to hinder labor-union involvement in politics.
Like previous third-party candidates, Nader compares his effort to that of Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party of 1856 and 1860--implying that the Greens will eventually supplant the Democrats just as the GOP supplanted the Whigs. But a truer match is the Communist William Z. Foster's campaign in 1932. The Communists, convinced that liberal Democrats and Socialists, not conservative Republicans, were holding back the revolution, denounced Franklin D. Roosevelt and Norman Thomas as "social fascists." Luckily, few Americans listened. But Americans did listen to the radicals who opposed Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and 1972 and Jimmy Carter in 1980 for being insufficiently left-wing. And these sectarian criticisms led not to the triumph of a new left but to a conservative political realignment. Nader thinks he is building a new "progressive political community," but he may simply be helping conservative Republicans prolong their reign.
Nader's new extremism certainly won't be tempered by the Green Party, on whose ballot line he hopes to run. The decade-old Greens, composed of the competing Green Party USA and the Association of State Green Parties, include sensible environmentalists who think the Democrats are too enamored of automobile companies. But they also include fringe animal-rights activists and aging hippies obsessed with legalizing drugs. At the June 24 Green Party convention in Denver, Nader will be challenged for the nomination by Jello Biafra, the former leader of the punk-rock band the Dead Kennedys, and Stephen Gaskin, founder of a hippie commune in Tennessee. Biafra wants to "abolish the military" and "lower the voting age to five." Gaskin wants to ask all the candidates "what [they have] done for reefer sanity in the USA."
At the local level, the party is no better. In Michigan the Green Party is split between a faction concerned with labor rights and another, based at Oakland University, focused on animal rights. (Potential compromise: collective bargaining for minks?) In Wisconsin, the Green Party's gubernatorial candidate expressed his fervent opposition to a corporate training center recently built by the university. He didn't oppose what it was going to teach the managers but the fact that it was teaching them at all. During dinner with Nader and the head of the North Carolina Greens at a vegetarian restaurant in Chapel Hill, I asked Nader why he had inveighed against hog farms in a speech earlier that day. Before Nader could reply, the Green Party representative explained that such farms encourage the consumption of meat. I looked over at Nader, and he said gently to his comrade, "I don't think we can be against carnivores."
Of course, in other states, like California and New Mexico, the Greens will be more of a help than a hindrance. Nader can also draw on the growing ferment on and around college campuses. Like the pre-Vietnam New Left of the early '60s, the new movements are primarily the product of prosperity rather than recession--of students who do not have to worry whether they will get jobs after college but can worry instead about child laborers in India and toxic-waste dumps near minority communities. They see corporations and international economic organizations in the same simplistic, demonized way Nader does. (In Madison, student picketers shouted, "Corporate scum, here we come!" in front of the corporate training center.) And they will probably organize unruly protests if Nader is excluded from the presidential debates this fall.
The Gore campaign still does not take Nader seriously; one adviser told me they were more worried about Buchanan winning Democratic blue-collar voters than about Nader mobilizing left-wingers. But this complacency could prove misplaced. Since the presidential campaign started last summer, there have already been two major political surprises: the large, militant demonstrations against globalization in Seattle and McCain's burst of strength in the Republican primaries. While these two events share little on the surface, both reflect a two-party system that is probably less stable than we yet realize. Nader's run could prove the third surprise event of this year's campaign. That's bad news for Al Gore, and probably for the rest of us as well.
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