The Wall St. Journal Commentary November 15, 2000
Don't Blame Nader For Democrats' Problems
By Christopher Hitchens, a columnist for Vanity Fair and the Nation. His most recent book is "No One Left To Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family" (Verso, 2000).
Liberal self-pity is an unattractive phenomenon, but liberal authoritarianism is an even more unattractive one. And the recent blend of the two has afforded us a repulsive spectacle.
"I'd like to kill Ralph Nader," an eyewitness report in my Washington Post has somebody saying at a Miramax party on election night. This thought was publicly seconded by the first lady, the healing and unifying senator-elect from New York, who opined that Mr. Nader's termination might be a great idea. I could easily fill this column with the names of has-been journalists and Democratic job-seekers who have, in the past week, expressed the very same desire, often on public airwaves. When this crowd stays on message, it stays on message. And it doesn't mind sounding like a resentful lynch-mob.
The supreme penalty to one side, why don't these compassionate intellectuals blame Mr. Nader for the Democrats' failure to retake the House and Senate (or even to bid for either chamber with candidates who were not either irretrievably deceased or uncontrollably rich)? Perhaps because no Green Party candidates made the difference in this case. But facing that fact would mean confronting the one thing that the "Kill Ralph" faction cannot accept. In this year of prosperity, peace and incumbency the Gore-Lieberman ticket was not able to win a convincing majority on its own merits.
Actually, there are many margins by which the vice president "lost" certain swing states. There is the very large margin of those who didn't care to vote at all. There is the exit-poll margin, surprisingly hefty particularly in Florida, which found voters who had been sickened by eight years of Clintonism. There is the unmentionable margin, also quite large in Florida, which disenfranchises adults with drug convictions even if these are for non-violent offenses. (This fruit of the illiberal and hysterical "war on drugs" may have removed as many as 13% of black males from the rolls, thus humiliating and degrading a constituency Mr. Gore prides himself on owning.) These questions are complex; how much easier to arraign those who made a difference just by thinking for themselves, and by resisting moral blackmail.
The mentality of the Democratic machine can be seen from the series of editorials published in the New York Times over the past few months. Increasingly ill-tempered and ill-written (the final one came close to calling on Phil Donahue's wife to dump him for his treachery as a Nader man), these screeds announced that a distinguished public citizen like Mr. Nader had no business putting himself before the electorate in the first place. They pettishly and angrily called upon him, not to reconsider, but to withdraw, and to consider himself rebuked. This was a gross inversion and negation of the familiar Voltairean cliche: The New York Times does not particularly disagree with what Mr. Nader says. It simply and categorically denies his right to say it!
Of course, we can now see how badly the Times and its bullying co-thinkers missed the boat. We would, opined the Great Gray Lady, say the same thing even if the Nader candidacy were spoiling the chances of another nominee. But, somehow, the paper never got around to printing a diatribe calling upon Pat Buchanan to stand down. (An odd omission, in a race universally agreed to be as tight as a miser's fist.) Now we see the shocked faces of Jewish retirees in Palm Beach who are convinced that they accidentally or carelessly endorsed America's first -- or America First's -- unique black/white Pat 'n Ezola fascist ticket. Yet only one "spoiler" counts for the liberals.
For the frustrating but potentially educational stand-off, too, Mr. Nader deserves a certain credit. By refusing to be intimidated, he has dramatized a long-overdue debate about the democratic underlay of the American electoral system.
Let's admit this much about the present arrangements: The stress on swing states and "undecided" voters does compel candidates to pretend a centrism they may not feel, and it does mean that an honest third-party voter can be faced with "objectively" endorsing his or her least-favorite second-best. A grown-up argument about whether to amend or abolish the arcane Electoral College rules is now inevitable. It took a radical to bring this about, but that's what radicals are supposed to do.
The party-minded and machine-organized Democratic commentators are still wedded to any system that allows their man a chance at bat, and furiously blame the dissident rather than the anomalies. Some labor-union types, as well as distinguished senators like Joe Biden and deep thinkers like Gloria Steinem and Kate Michaelman, are already talking publicly about their plans for revenge and exclusion; the ostracism of an uncaring Mr. Nader. This herd behavior illustrates -- and not for the first time -- the thuggish cast of the Clintonian mind.
It's also become rather plain that in many states there is more than a little dark and surreptitious work at election times, and that it probably involves an unspoken collusion between both major parties, neither of whom expect to demand an investigation of each other's practices. Not any more: I think that electoral "transparency" will be an issue in its own right from now on. But here again, mobbish Democrats see nothing wrong with a First Ward or Cook County election as long as the result is acceptable to them. As this inquiry gathers momentum, it will be found that Mr. Nader was the first man to bring suit against, or to call attention to, either party's rule-bending.
If I seem to have singled out the Democrats and liberals, it is because I did not read a single attack in a conservative journal, or from a Republican spokesman, on Pat Buchanan's right to run as a "spoiler." But when the Democrats and the liberals are hurt, they first squeal and then threaten. It's not Mr. Nader who owes anyone an apology. It's those who followed their boss, and his pathetic deputy Mr. Gore, in first making deceitful apologies for the abuse of power and then claiming that the apology was for something that their man hadn't "really" done. They thought there would be no consequences, and now that they find it's otherwise they will, as usual, blame anybody but themselves.
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