Unsafe at Any Speed
Why a vote for Nader will weaken, not build, the progressive movement
by Harold Meyerson
Let's start with two propositions. First, Ralph Nader is a genuine American hero who is running on what is the progressive community's dream program for America. Second, his third-party presidential candidacy is a monumental exercise in wrong-headedness that, far from building the left "for the long haul," as Naderites are wont to say, will cripple it for any haul, long, short or in between.
It's one thing to vote for Nader in a state like California that appears to be a likely win for Gore (but keep checking those polls). In states too close to call, however, a vote for Nader could surely trigger a Bush Fratboy Restoration, with all that entails. Some prospective Nader voters acknowledge that a vote for Ralph comes at a real cost — but not one that in the end is too high to pay. Writing in Sunday's Los Angeles Times, Clancy Sigal (author of one of the greatest unsung American novels, Going Away) concedes that "people may be hurt by my Nader vote . . . the economically disenfranchised . . . the elderly and the ill" who would suffer if W. becomes president. However, he argues, "I am into a long-term struggle to help build a ‘new, progressive coalition' that outflanks the Democratic Party . . . "
This raises the age-old question of whether the end justifies the means — but we need to pose an easier question first: Does a "successful" Nader candidacy (which Naderites define as one that pulls 5 percent of the nationwide vote, thus qualifying the Greens for federal funding in 2004) build a "new progressive coalition" at all? (This is a question that pertains even in states that are safe for Gore, since we're talking about aggregate national totals.) Suppose the Greens do become political players after this election. What will that mean for the future of left politics?
To the best of my knowledge, Nader has addressed this question specifically only once: in an interview with David Moberg in the October 30 issue of In These Times, the independent left periodical. Nader begins by acknowledging that if he lived in the congressional district of Henry Waxman, the West Los Angeles Democrat who's long been the most successful legislative champion of consumer rights and higher health and environmental standards, he'd vote for Waxman unhesitatingly. (Indeed, when he was asked by a reporter at this summer's Green Party Convention to name three things he liked about America, Nader listed Waxman as thing number two.)
At this point, though, Nader's sketch of his strategic vision for the Greens becomes mind-boggling. Two years hence, if a Green runs against his number-two favorite American thing, says Nader, he'll back the Green. "There's an overriding goal here, and that's to build a majority party," he says. "I hate to use military analogies, but this is war . . . After November, we're going to go after the Congress in a very detailed way, district by district. If [Democrats in a particular district] are winning 51 to 49 percent, we're going to go in and beat them with Green votes. They've got to lose people, whether they're good or bad." Moberg goes on to report that "Nader is willing to sacrifice progressives like [Senators] Russ Feingold in Wisconsin or [Paul] Wellstone [in Minnesota]." Nader explains, "That's the burden they're going to have to bear for letting their party go astray. It's too bad."
I'll say it's too bad! What Nader is proposing is a policy of "no friends on the left" — that the Greens target as their main enemy such left leaders as Wellstone and Feingold, the only political members who both share their beliefs and who actually win elections. Most progressive Democratic House figures have safe seats — but some don't. The late George Brown Jr., who cast the first House vote against the Vietnam War, who led the successful fight against Reagan's Star Wars lunacy and who voted against the welfare-reform bill of 1996, represented for nearly 30 years a center-right district in San Bernardino. He was repeatedly re-elected by 51-to-49 percent margins, at best, and he went right on casting one politically suicidal vote after another to follow the dictates of his conscience.
It's precisely the George Browns whom Nader's Greens would defeat. And progressive senators (since senators represent states, not safe congressional districts) like Wellstone — the Senate's leading advocate of universal single-payer health insurance — and Feingold — the Senate's leading advocate of campaign finance reform.
And to what end? There isn't one chance in a million the Greens could become a majority party in the U.S. Nowhere in the world (except, for a time, in Tasmania) have the Greens even managed to win a plurality in multiparty elections. Where they are in government as minority members of left coalitions, as in Germany, it's because they have won between 5 and 10 percent of the vote — in nations where such a vote entitles a party to seats in parliament. And in these nations, voting Green isn't agonizing; it's easy. In these nations, a Green vote doesn't come at the expense of the Social Democrats: The two parties can and often do join together in coalition. In the American electoral system, by contrast, with its winner-take-all vote count, Green votes will always come at the expense of the Democrats. Which is to say, the only possible effect of running against the all-too-few Wellstones, Feingolds and George Browns of this world will be to elect Republicans.
Yet this is the promised end for which prospective Nader voters are being asked to sacrifice, in Sigal's words, "the economically disenfranchised, the elderly and the ill."
The strategy of "no friends on the left" isn't without precedent, though fortunately, it hasn't popped up all that often. Its most prominent manifestation was what historians refer to as "third-period Communism" — the line adhered to by communist parties, during the early Stalinist years of 1928–35, of designating socialist parties rather than fascist parties as their main enemy. The most notorious exercise of this policy came in the German elections of 1933, when the Communists insisted the real enemies were the left-wing Social Democrats, whom they called "Social Fascists." The Nazis were just a passing phenomenon, so the Communists refused to make common cause with the other left parties (whom, instead, they attacked) against the Nazis. Whereupon the Nazis won a narrow plurality, took power, imprisoned all the Communists they could find, killed their leaders, and did worse things to other folks.
I'm not for a second equating George W. Bush, or even Dick Armey and Tom DeLay, to Nazis. But you don't have to be a Nazi to inflict terrible hardship on the poor and people of color, and irrevocable damage to the ecosystem. I am saying, though, that if there's a single historic instance where the policy of "no-friends-on-the-left" or "it-has-to-get-worse-before-it-gets-better" actually worked in the long run, I sure don't know what it is. Nader backers who should know better are suffering from a highly selective historical amnesia when they make these arguments.
Nor are they any less amnesiac in suggesting the Greens can someday supplant one of the two major parties. The only third party in American history ever to pull that off, of course, was the Republicans, and that was the result of a unique set of circumstances. The two major parties, the Whigs and the Democrats, were national parties that were already crumbling by the 1850s because they could no longer reconcile their Northern and Southern wings on the question of slavery. The Republicans were a Northern party only, and in 1860, Lincoln polled just 39 percent of the popular vote — which, however, was enough to win, since Democrats had three presidential candidates that year, one from the North, one from the South and one from the border states. In the years before or after, though, no other third party has endured — not even the 1912 Progressives, whose standard bearer was the immensely popular former president Teddy Roosevelt. Absent a shift to proportional representation or the implosion of one of the two major parties — neither of which looms on or even over the horizon — a third party cannot and will not overtake the Dems or Republicans.
So is there no way to impact the electoral system from the left? Am I arguing that Nader should not have run at all?
In fact, there was one way in which Nader could have run that would have enabled him to have much greater influence than he's having today, with none of the risk that he could make George W. Bush the next president. He could have run in the Democratic primaries.
This, of course, would not have enabled him to level his attacks on the entire Democratic Party as such — lock, stock and Wellstone. But, like Wellstone, Jesse Jackson and numerous other progressives, he could have leveled the very same attacks he's leveling now on the corporatization of the party, on its rightward drift and betrayal of working people. Other than arguing for a third party, there's nothing Nader is saying now that he couldn't have said in the primaries. And gotten a much bigger audience, won more votes, and built a much more potent movement, while saying it.
Consider what would have happened if Nader had run in this year's primaries. First, he would have been included in all the televised debates between Al Gore and Bill Bradley. Second, progressives who wouldn't dream of voting for Nader this November would have flocked to his banner this spring. Third, he would have been able to raise much more small-donor money to get his message out. Fourth, it's likely he would have won the primary endorsement of two national mega-unions: the Teamsters and the United Auto Workers. And fifth, he could quite conceivably have carried some states, come to the Democratic Convention with a bloc of delegates, had his name placed into nomination and addressed the convention, and the nation, at length.
I think back to the last weekend of the New Hampshire primary, when Gore's shock-troop volunteers on the sidewalks of Nashua came from the UAW, and Bill Bradley's came from college campuses up and down the East Coast. When the two groups met and got to talking, however, they discovered they disagreed with their respective candidates and agreed with each other on the issue of trade; that they'd both been thrilled by Seattle and appalled by the Bradley-Gore support for NAFTA and kindred accords. Both groups supported universal health insurance and a crackdown on corporations; the list goes on. In a word, both groups were Naderites — only, Nader wasn't on their ballots.
Certainly, Nader would have stolen much of the thunder of John McCain, especially on campuses. McCain's candidacy gives the lie to the idea that you only really alter the political agenda by running outside the major parties. Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy, whose 1968 candidacies effectively and irrevocably turned the Democratic Party against the Vietnam War, would disagree. So would Jesse Jackson and Pat Buchanan.) Compare Buchanan's ability to alter public discourse in his '92 inside-the-GOP race to his impact today, where he's crying inaudibly in the wilderness.) For that matter, the three main left-wing third-party presidential candidates of the past hundred years — Eugene Debs, Norman Thomas and Henry Wallace — all ran before presidential primaries really came into being, at a time when Democratic delegates were entirely selected by party bosses. It's not at all clear that they (particularly Wallace) would have opted for the third-party route had they run in a post-1968 system. (1968 was the last election in which machines, not voters, selected the major party nominees.)
It could be argued, I suppose, that primary-candidate Nader might have had a hard time holding together his progressive forces and shaping them into a permanent organization after the Democratic National Convention. It wouldn't be nearly as hard, however, as shaping the Green Party into that kind of force. No one who's looked at the actual Greens would come away thinking that this was an organization capable of such a task. Many Greens have come to the party precisely because they have an anti-organizational perspective. Others, including a majority of the Green activists I've encountered, are there to insist on a kind of lifestyle purity, arguing, for instance, that the party must officially endorse veganism.
Indeed, if Nader were to cross the magical 5 percent threshold, the party might not even be up to defending its own ballot line, so few and inept are its members. At this summer's national convention, New Mexico Greens were busily leafleting against their own nominee for a congressional seat, a non-member with no particularly Green beliefs who'd won their primary as a write-in candidate. With the party all but nonexistent in two dozen states, a takeover of the kind Pat Buchanan conducted in the Reform Party is more than plausible. That knocking on the party's door would likely be Lenora Fulani.
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Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass --
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