On Thu, 20 Jul 2000, Doug Henwood wrote:
> Nathan Newman wrote:
>
> >I know careful strategy that is not self-defeating has less appeal than a
> >purist lost cause like Nader, but it may actually help change policy and
> >improve people's lives rather than just be an excuse to bash other
> >activists for not being pure enough in their methods.
>
> Nathan, this is a very cheap shot, which I'll charitably attribute to
> the remnants of a guilty conscience. I'm not looking for an excuse to
> bash activists; you're the one doing the bashing in this window, in
> fact.
Well, I was reacting to comments like Seth's such as "No doubt you'd adopt a stance of critical support for Scaife, noting that we can always pressure him from the center once he's in office."
If you want to argue that no one has accused me or other supporters of Gore of having sold-out politically by taking that position, you have not been reading a lot of email on this list - including your own :)
Nor am I interested in promoting self-defeat. In fact, those of
> us who (critically) support Nader are looking for a way out of the
> short-term, vote Democratic pragmatism that promotes long-term
> self-defeat. Every 2 or 4 years it's, yeah it'd be nice if X could
> win, but s/he can't, so better vote Dem. And so the Dems can flip the
> bird to their most loyal voters and become ever-more-loyal servants
> of capital. At some point, wouldn't even a pragmatic social democrat
> have to break with this logic - not out of purity, but out of a
> desire to stop this endless process of concession and compromise?
Your logic would be convincing if there was not a simple way to run left campaigns that avoid the spoiler problem - namely run in the Democratic primary. All the arguments even for losing campaigns apply to such primary campaigns - from "expanding the debate" to energizing non-voters. In fact, the evidence is Jesse Jackson's campaigns which had that exact result, leading to massive voter gains especially in the South, helped create the political threat that defeated Robert Bork, and expanded the Congressional Black Caucus through expanded voter participation in black communities.
Your argument for threatening to vote third party as a threat to keep Dems paying attention to our issues is no different from the always existing threat not to show up to vote or just vote for the Republican candidate (as some urged back in 1968 and even 1972 as a protest against the Dems). It adds no positive power beyond the tools of not voting or voting for the enemy - in fact it has the exact same effect.
What I don't get about the third party fundamentalists and even "critical supporters" like yourself is the obsession with the general election to almost complete lack of involvement in primary campaigns. What bothers me is that all the organizational energy of Green or other third party activists goes only to those general election campaigns, while bypassing the real opportunity to elect people in the primary. If Nader had run in the Democratic primary, I would not only have voted for him, I would have been out there campaigning for him. As would a hell of a lot of other people. That would have really reshaped the debate in the Democratic Party and in the country, since it might have even threatened Gore for the nomination since he would not have had the same solid labor support against Nader's trade position.
Everyone points to Eugene Debs as an example of successful third party politics, but the difference then was that the primary elections were closed to leftists and was the classic era of the smoked filled room. The only way to impact the choice of nominee without direct primaries was through the threat of running candidates in the general election. As the parties have been more and more opened to direct participation in the primaries, it has become much more effective to run at the primary level to directly influence the party choices.
It is not as if Nader is the only serious left-supported third party candidate to run for President since Debs - we've had La Follette, Henry Wallace, Dick Gregory, Eldridge Cleaver and Barry Commoner plus a constant stream of socialist candidates of various stripes. It is not as if any of them had any really large political impact, except maybe the negative aspect of helping to split the labor movement in the case of the Wallace campaign.
I know, you will say IF labor and other liberal/progressive groups supported Nader, his campaign would be different, but the point is that they are not seriously supporting him. And they are not supporting him because Dubya and his Supreme Court appointments and his willingness to sign any crap promoted by Trent Lott is too dangerous.
So my question is: where were Nader and the Greens in the primary when they could have gotten the support of a lot of folks like myself?
-- Nathan Newman