[GPRI] Maass: Why Ralph Nader Took a Stand

[John Gallagher]

Overall, it's an interesting article, but I do have to
question Alan Maass' conjecture on his following
statement.  I musr admit I have amnesia about the
broohaha between Nader & the Green Party.
                                         John G

"Even the Green Party abandoned its commitment to an
all-out third-party campaign and rejected an
endorsement of Nader's independent candidacy."

                             Alan Maass

http://www.counterpunch.org/maass03242007.html

March 24 / 25, 2007

The Legacy of an Unreasonable Man
Why Ralph Nader Took a Stand
By ALAN MAASS

No one can say that the documentary An Unreasonable
Man sugarcoats the case against its subject.

The film opens with Ralph Nader mumbling through a
brief statement at a sparsely attended press
conference during his 2004 presidential campaign. Then
comes several minutes of vitriolic denunciations of
Nader by three of the most unpleasant, puffed-up and
dishonest fixtures of the liberal
firmament--Democratic "strategist" James Carville,
author Todd Gitlin and Nation columnist Eric Alterman.

If you aren't familiar with their complaints on the
subject, they are easily summarized: Ralph Nader,
because he ran for president in 2000 as a third-party
candidate against Al Gore and George Bush, is
responsible everything bad that's happened during the
Bush presidency.

Every. Thing.

"Thank you Ralph for the Iraq war, thank you Ralph for
the tax cuts, thank you Ralph for the destruction of
the environment, thank you Ralph for the destruction
of the Constitution," Alterman spits out. "I just
think the man needs to go away. I think he needs to
live in a different country. He's done enough damage
to this one; let him damage someone else's now."

"Wicked," "megalomaniac," "politically idiotic,"
"deluded" and "psychologically troubled" are a few of
the terms of abuse Alterman and friends lob at Nader.

If only they managed a tenth of this kind of venom
when talking about Republicans. But instead, their
sanctimonious and humorless diatribes are directed at
the man responsible for seatbelts and airbags in cars,
anti-pollution laws, any number of workplace safety
regulations--and the most significant left-wing
electoral challenge to the two-party political system
in a half-century.

Fortunately, An Unreasonable Man spends the next two
hours following Nader's history, and what emerges
plainly from the film's interviews with supporters and
detractors alike is that Nader's transformation--from
a reformer working firmly within the Washington system
to a renegade confronting the two parties from the
outside--is wholly in keeping with the commitment to
democratic principles that motivated him his whole
political life.

The Democrats' claim that Nader was a "spoiler" who
caused Gore's defeat in 2000 is wrong for any number
of reasons--not least, the fact that Gore won both the
popular vote and the election in Florida that would
have given him a win in the Electoral College, but the
Democrats were too timid to fight the Republicans'
theft of the White House.

But Nader's real crime for Democrats is that his
campaign represented a popular challenge to the
two-party corporate-dominated system--and the deeply
engrained politics of "lesser evilism" that convinces
liberals and progressives, time and time again, to
support a Democrat who inevitably betrays them without
a second thought.


* * *

AN UNREASONABLE Man documents Nader's rise to
prominence in the 1960s as a relentless crusader
against corporate abuses and political corruption, in
the face of entrenched opposition--a history that
makes the liberal insult that Nader is an egomaniac
seem particularly foolish.

The long list of laws Nader played a central part in
winning is remarkable--the National Automobile and
Highway Traffic Safety Act, Clean Water Act, Clean Air
Act, Mine Health and Safety Act, Freedom of
Information Act, Occupational Safety and Health Act.

As Nader acknowledges, these accomplishments were made
possible by the rise of mass movements that shook U.S.
society in the 1960s and early '70s. But as these
movements went into retreat in the mid-1970s, Nader's
inside-the Beltway efforts ran up against the
rightward shift in mainstream politics and the
reassertion of corporate power.

The turning point was the presidency of Jimmy Carter,
who Nader considered an ally and advised during the
1976 election campaign. Once in office, Carter dragged
his feet on promised regulations. When Nader's
proposal for a Consumer Protection Agency came up for
a vote in the Democratic-controlled Congress in 1978,
corporations pulled out all the stops to defeat
it--and Carter sat on his hands while it died.

With Reagan, the tide turned even more sharply against
Nader's agenda, but the impact of the era was felt
just as strongly on the Democratic Party. As Nader
points out in the film, he spent much of the next two
decades trying to pressure the Democrats to take up
liberal issues, but the "party of ordinary people"
didn't want to cross big business.

"So when people say why did you do this in 2000, I'm a
20-year veteran of pursuing the folly of the least
worst between the two parties," Nader says. "Because
when you do that, you end up allowing them both to get
worse every four years."

After a half-hearted Green Party presidential campaign
in 1996, Nader ran all out in 2000, amid renewed
activism around the global justice and other
movements. The documentary's footage of the Nader
"super-rallies"--which brought together thousands, and
then tens of thousands, of people in a string of
cities--gives a sense of the excitement.

But the attacks from Democrats grew to a fever pitch
as the election approached. When the Florida vote was
decided for Bush--without the Democrats fighting for a
recount that would have given Gore the edge--the
liberals blamed not the incompetent Gore campaign that
blew an election which was theirs to lose, but Ralph
Nader.

No slander was out of bounds. Investigative journalist
James Ridgeway describes Nader's enemies as "the
meanest bunch of motherfuckers I've ever come
across"--and it's worth stressing that he's talking
not about some faceless corporate behemoth or
right-wing Republican fanatic, but the liberal
Democrats who Nader once counted as trusted allies.

When Nader ran again in 2004, his campaign was snowed
under by the "Anybody But Bush" hysteria. Even the
Green Party abandoned its commitment to an all-out
third-party campaign and rejected an endorsement of
Nader's independent candidacy.

Nevertheless, as talk show host and Nader supporter
Phil Donahue points out, for all the venomous attacks
on him, the Democrats did precisely what Nader warned
they would.

"They killed him for saying there's not a dime's worth
of difference between the two parties," Donahue says.
"And then the Democrats spent the next four years
proving that he was right. The Democrats folded on the
war. They folded on health care and No Child Left
Behind. They hid under their desks."

The irony is that Nader's politics are not nearly as
radical as the challenge his presidential campaigns
represented. His positions on certain issues, such as
immigration, fall short of a left-wing alternative.

In fact, despite the experience of the 2000 and 2004
campaign, Nader still talks sometimes as if he hopes
the Democrats will take up his challenge to speak to
"the issues that really command the felt concerns and
daily life of millions of Americans"--as if the
problem with the Democratic Party is a matter of the
people in charge, rather than the institution itself.

But what sets Nader apart is that he has continued to
try to act on his commitment to democracy and justice,
even when that put him at odds with the Washington
system that was once the center of his political
universe.

The result is that Nader will be remembered by history
as not only the man who put seatbelts and airbags in
cars--but who gave voice at a crucial time to the need
for an alternative to the corporate duopoly that
dominates U.S. politics.

Alan Maass is the editor of the Socialist Worker. He
can be reached at: alanmaass at sbcglobal.net


 



 
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