Indeed, the split between realists and fundamentalists in the ranks of the Greens seems also to be taking place within Nader's inner circle, if not within Nader's own mind. Just this Saturday, I received a fund solicitation from Public Citizen — Nader's signature organization, which he founded in 1971 and over which he remains the guiding spirit. The gist of the letter is that Public Citizen is the main organization fighting for the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill, which has fallen short of enactment by just a "handful of votes" (the letter's emphasis) in the Senate (where, in fact, the Democrats are expected to pick up several more members Tuesday). Of course, Al Gore has pledged that McCain-Feingold will be his first priority, while W. has said in no uncertain terms that he would veto it. Yet Nader is prepared to sacrifice the number-one priority of Public Citizen to his candidacy. When he told Moberg that "this is war," he apparently meant: against the Democrats, against Democratic progressives, against progressive groups that need the Democrats, against his very own organization and its most important goal.
Enough about parties. What about movements? For when Nader claims to be building a left, he asserts that his candidacy will be good for the groups that really do the day-to-day drudge work of building a decent America — the unions, the environmental organizations; the civil rights, feminist, pro-choice and anti-poverty groups working both in Washington and in countless neighborhoods across the country.
Time and again, Nader has argued that even if he draws so many votes from Gore that Bush becomes president, one of two things will happen. The first possibility is, it won't really matter: Just this weekend, he argued on one of the Sunday talk-shows that "Even if Roe v. Wade is reversed, that doesn't end it. It just reverts it back to the states." (Young women in the anti-choice South, I guess, will just have to be prepared to travel, or look around for some back alleys.) His second possibility isn't quite so dismissive: If a Republican Supreme Court does overturn Roe or the civil-rights statues it has already begun to erode, if W.'s minions at the Interior Department start selling off the national parks, it will lead to a huge, reactive resurgence in the strength of progressive movements. "There's never been a retrenchment in civil rights since the Dred Scott decision," he told me when I interviewed him shortly before the Green Party convention this summer, ignoring a string of recent 5-to-4 court decisions that limited the applicability of federal civil-rights statutes to the states. "These things are not going to be pulled back — and if they are, it would probably be the greatest source of a revival in civic action in our generation."
(Of course, if we started bombing Vietnam again, it would be the greatest source of a revival in antiwar action in a generation, too. That doesn't make it a good idea to put in power people inclined to do it.)
Nader refers frequently to the increase in Sierra Club membership that resulted from the tenure of the rabidly anti-environment James Watt as Ronald Reagan's secretary of interior — indeed, to the membership increases in many national progressive groups during that time. The Sierra Club is cognizant of its membership figures, of course, but, in the words of Dan Weiss, its national political director, "the view that we can afford four years of irreversible damage to our environment is naive at best, irresponsible at worst. It's like saying we have to destroy the "village in order to save it."
Thus the Sierra Club — and the League of Conservation Voters, and Friends of the Earth, and the National Abortion Rights Action League and the Human Rights Campaign and NOW and the NAACP, all groups whose membership might indeed increase if Bush wins — are moving heaven and earth to elect Al Gore. "We'll all be totally on the defensive," says Torie Osborn, executive director of the Liberty Hill Foundation and the former head of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. "We won't be promoting our own agendas, we'll be trying to save the achievements of past decades. For gays and lesbians, it will be back to survival, to defending our basic humanity."
In Nader's list of all the groups that increased their membership during those exciting Reagan years, there's one category of organization that he rightly omits: unions. The membership of unions does not swell when an anti-union administration is in power, because the effect of such an administration has been to make it easier for employers to thwart their workers' efforts to form or join unions. By the refusal of their Labor Board appointees to protect workers rights, Republican presidents since Nixon have accelerated the decades-long decline in union membership and power.
But George W. Bush has vowed to do a great deal more than just appoint anti-union activists to oversee workers rights. In his speeches, he routinely calls for "paycheck protection" — that is, for limiting the ability of unions to devote their resources to political campaigns (on which business currently outspends labor by an 11-to-1 margin). This proposal was essentially the substance of California's Proposition 226, which state voters rejected in 1998. In fact, busting unions will surely be the chief strategic political goal of a Bush administration. It's only by virtue of the election-time activity of the newly revitalized labor movement that the Democrats have been able to pick up congressional seats since the 1994 debacle. More than that, though, unionists are one group of people whom the Great Uniter has never in any way included in his gubernatorial administration. W. is the first governor of Texas not to appoint a single union representative to the state's boards overseeing occupational health and safety. And should congressional Republicans resurrect the TEAM Act — a bill they nearly got through Congress during Clinton's presidency that would have allowed employers to set up their own "worker associations" to compete with genuine unions in the workplace — Bush would certainly sign it.
The damage to the American left from any of these actions would be huge. Since John Sweeney took the helm at the AFL-CIO in 1995, labor has become the sine qua non of American progressivism — the force behind the municipal living-wage movements and all efforts to raise the minimum wage, the chief opponent of for-profit HMOs and the chief advocate for universal health care and affordable prescription drugs, even the foremost champion of immigrant rights. Under Sweeney, the four-decade slide in union membership has finally stopped (last year was the first in the last 17 when the share of unionized workers did not decline), but the union share of the work force is still a very shaky 13.9 percent. If George W. Bush becomes president, there's no doubt that labor will come under a fierce, and possibly terminal, attack, dragging a panoply of other worthy causes down with it.
So we have, in Ralph Nader, a candidate who personifies the spirit of Seattle — articulating a democratic vision counter to global order run by and for corporations. And we have, in American labor, the movement that is the linchpin of the Seattle coalition, that is the leading force, not just in the U.S. but in the entire world, for establishing global standards for worker rights. This November, progressives have to choose between the man and the movement. They have to choose between a party that will never become a vehicle for building the left (indeed, that already sets the left against itself) and a movement that has already given progressivism a new life in many cities, most especially our own, and without which no progressive American future can even be sketched.
This is really that hard a choice?
If the strategic rationales for the Nader campaign are ultimately spurious, there remains the claim from countless Nader supporters that they — presumably unlike anyone else — are voting their conscience. The assumption here is that you betray your conscience by settling for less than a candidate who champions and personifies your ideals. But I would think (at least, I would hope) you just as surely betray your conscience if the consequence of your vote is to impose avoidable hardship on others more vulnerable than you. Yet I get the sense from many Nader die-hards that since the intent of their vote is pure, the effect of their vote is really of little or no matter.
So let's look at just one utterly predictable consequence of voting for Nader over Gore, at least in states that are hanging in the balance on election day (most likely not our own), and see if it withstands this consequence-based conscience test.
During the 12 long years of the Reagan and Pappy Bush presidencies, there was a single begrudging raise in the minimum wage. Since Clinton has become president, there's been one (along with significant increases in the Earned Income Tax Credit) and he is currently trying to pry one more from the Republican Congress. Al Gore is clearly committed to a hike in the minimum wage; George W. Bush is just as clearly opposed. In fact, he's opposed to the entire idea of a federal minimum wage, preferring a system where states get to set their own. (In Bush's Texas, in the year 2000, agricultural workers — one group of workers who are exempted from the federal minimum wage — make a breathtaking $3.35 an hour.)
Ralph Nader is for a federal living wage (that is, an hourly wage of about $8.50 with health benefits), as am I — but his support, even augmented by mine, doesn't put this proposal within three light-years of enactment. What is on the agenda in America is merely raising the minimum wage, and that will only happen during the next four years if Al Gore becomes president next Tuesday. So imagine you are a swing-state voter talking to a nonunion janitor making the legal minimum in one of the 40 or so states whose government has no interest in setting a state minimum wage that's higher than the feds'. (There are up to half a million nonunion janitors in these low-wage states, and surveys of this work force have shown that the janitor you're talking to is most likely an immigrant or African-American woman with children.) Tell her that you're sorry she's going to have to work for at least the next four years without a raise, but that it's more important to build a "new progressive coalition" (even though a successful Nader candidacy will have precisely the opposite effect), or that you're tired of voting for a candidate who favors only a fraction of what you think we really need, and who will deliver on even less. Tell her you'll feel better voting for a candidate you agree with on everything.
If you can look at her and tell her that with a clear conscience — then, yes, you should vote for Ralph Nader. And shame on you.
<FONT COLOR="#8000ff" BACK="#ffffff" style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffffff" SIZE=6 PTSIZE=20 FACE="P
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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