According to Lou, Nader reminds idealistic white youths of their favorite high school civics teachers. That's Nader's strength as well as limitation. Moreover, Nader & the Green Party, too, may contribute to the dumbing down of leftist discourse by their foreign policy stance.
At 9:38 AM -0400 10/14/00, Louis Proyect wrote:
>Date: Sat, 14 Oct 2000 09:38:38 -0400
>To: marxism at lists.panix.com, pen-l at galaxy.csuchico.edu,
> SOCIALIST-REGISTER at YORKU.CA
>From: Louis Proyect <lnp3 at panix.com>
>Subject: [PEN-L:3139] Ralph Nader super-rally in Madison Square Garden
>
>After paying my $20 admission, I joined the swarms of people ascending the
>escalator at Madison Square Garden and took my seat. The overhead giant TV
>screens were running videos of youthful protestors in Seattle being
>cornered by nasty-looking cops--not the typical fare for a "liberal"
>presidential campaign.
>
>At 5 minutes to 8pm emcee Phil Donohue took the podium. The fact that the
>rally started *early* was symptomatic of the well-oiled professionalism of
>the whole event, facilitated no doubt by the heavy involvement of media
>professionals like Donohue, who was the very first afternoon TV talk show
>host in the USA. People like this understand how to run things on a tight
>schedule. I wish the Marxist left would learn from them.
>
>I like Donohue. Along with people like Ed Asner and Norman Lear (creator of
>"All in the Family", the Archie Bunker show), Donohue struggled--usually in
>vain--to preserve a liberal voice on network television. Since the decline
>of the 1960s radicalization and the increase of media monopoly, there is
>virtually no challenge to mainstream opinion on the television networks.
>
>Donohue drew attention to this in his introductory remarks. He said that 20
>years ago the law prevented a corporation from owning more than 5 radio
>stations. After that law was repealed a few years ago, the trend toward
>monopolization has been irresistible. Today one company owns 800 radio
>stations. He said that the media itself will not draw attention to its own
>excesses, nor will it talk about other issues that Nader has prioritized.
>These included inadequate health care and insurance, campaign financing
>and--most interestingly--the "war on drugs."
>
>As it turned out, the Nader campaign's objection to the current Draconian
>drug laws ran like a red thread throughout the entire evening. It was a way
>to address racism, since most of the people busted for drug violations are
>blacks and other minorities who were victimized by "profiling." It also
>spoke to the life-style, if not libertarian, concerns of a mostly youthful
>audience that resented laws against marijuana. Speaking of the composition
>of the audience, the sell-out crowd of 15,000 appeared to be at least 98
>percent white and youthful. It reminded me a lot of the kind of people who
>showed up at the antiwar demonstrations I and other hard-core
>revolutionaries organized in the 1960s--committed enough to show up, but
>probably not committed enough to join a radical group.
>
>The next part of the rally consisted of big name actors and musicians
>paying tribute to Ralph Nader. I found Bill Murray's remarks the most
>moving. Murray became famous as a performer on the cutting-edge Saturday
>Night Live in the 1960s (tamed by television executives long ago) and then
>went on to a successful movie career. Murray talked about the importance of
>the Vietnam antiwar movement to him in the 1960s and how he hoped that the
>Nader campaign could inspire a similar movement.
>
>The musicians were fabulous: Ani DeFranco, Ben Harper, Eddie Vedder, and
>most of all Patti Smith who sang "Over the Rainbow" as a token of the hopes
>that today's Green Party could build a wonderful Emerald City of its own.
>
>After such a great buildup, Nader's speech was a bit anticlimactic. Nader
>has a rather wooden delivery that emphasizes highly detailed--if not
>statistical--indictments of social injustice in the United States. Despite
>this, the mostly youthful audience ate it up. The explanation for this is
>simple. Nader evokes your favorite high school civics teacher. In his
>appeals to returning the United States to a more democratic and more just
>society, he would seem to tap into the innocence of young students who need
>an established figure as an alternative to the greed and corruption they
>see all around them.
>
>For me the most impressive part of Nader's hour-long speech was the
>extended salute to the USA's social and political mass movements. He hailed
>the abolitionists, the populist farmer revolt, the CIO, the suffragists,
>the modern woman's movement, the civil rights movement, the anti-nuclear
>movement as ways in which the true creativity and morality of the American
>people can be expressed. One movement--alas--that he did not salute was the
>Vietnam antiwar movement. And that was no accident.
>
>During the entire rally, there was hardly any analysis or critique of US
>foreign policy today. It was shocking in light of the day's headlines, with
>the threat of war in the Middle East. I would analyze this refusal to
>discuss foreign policy as a function of two separate but related dynamics.
>
>First of all, Nader has gone through life as a reformer of injustices
>within the United States. His formidable talents are focused laser-like on
>issues such as consumer safety, environmental degradation, campaign
>financing, etc. Although he has fought the good fight, it is simply
>inadequate for a major progressive election campaign to pretend that the
>rest of the world does not exist at least from the standpoint of US
>military and diplomatic policies. It is one thing to attack
>"globalization", it is another thing to state that perhaps US destroyers
>are being blown up because the US military does not have the right to turn
>the Persian Gulf into an American lake.
>
>This ties into a concern that first appeared in the pages of the Nation,
>when Michael Moore, who introduced Nader to the Garden audience, excoriated
>the American left for worrying about exotic causes like Mumia or
>interventions overseas when the average American worker cares more about
>adequate health care or runaway shops. This basically conservative
>adaptation to the moods of the US working class was also reflected in a
>talk at a big rally at Columbia University a few years ago co-sponsored by
>the AFL-CIO and important left academic figures . Richard Rorty, a
>neo-pragmatist, scolded the 1960s left for making the Vietnam war such a
>big issue. By doing this, it alienated blue collar workers who might have
>been won to a progressive agenda if not for the inflammatory antiwar
>demonstrations. Needless to say, this is a wretched analysis and one that I
>hope does not become institutionalized in future Green Party election
>campaigns.
>
>
>Louis Proyect
>Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/
Yoshie