[GPRI] Maass: Why Ralph Nader Took a Stand

[Greg Gerritt]

I would not take a statement by the Socialist workers about how the Green
party ran campaigns in 2004 to be particularly truthful.

If anyone wants a real explanation about what happened in 2004 between Nader
and the Green party, call me at 331-0529 or read Green Party Tempest.

greg


on 3/26/07 8:05 PM, John Gallagher at johnniecakes59 at yahoo.com wrote:

> 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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