--- Original Message --- con1453 at aol.com Wrote on Thu, 26 Oct 2000 22:14:32 -0700
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Note that the Right is laughing at BOTH sides of the Nader debate, with some justification:
<<Washington Bulletin: National Review's Internet Update for October 25, 2000 http://www.nationalreview.com
By Ramesh Ponnuru and John J. Miller
THE AGONY OF THE AMERICAN LEFT
The latest issue of the Nation quotes Peter DeFazio, Oregon Democrat and chairman of the House Progressive Caucus, on Al Gore: "Look, he's running on our issues -- health care, education, taking on the big companies. You don't hear him touting Blue Dog and New Democrat stuff -- free trade, capital-gains tax cuts, privatizing Social Security, vouchers, whatever. Instead, he's taking on pharmaceuticals, insurance companies, HMOs, big oil. You can't then turn around and govern in a different way."
Robert Borosage, the author of the article, also notes that it would be a major boon for leftists if the Democrats took back the House. He quotes a "senior [Democratic] leadership staffer" saying that "the leadership and most of the committee chairs are more liberal than the caucus." Borosage points out that Dick Gephardt, David Bonior, John Conyers, David Obey, Charles Rangel, George Miller, Pete Stark, and various "[m]embers of the black caucus" would have important positions in a Democratic House.
Borosage's article should be useful to Republican fundraisers and editorialists. But there is something a little pathetic about it. So battered and weak is the contemporary Left that it has been reduced to banking on seniority in Congress -- the same thing that a bygone generation of Southern segregationist Democrats used to hold on to power. Nor can leftists really take much comfort from Gore. Gore appears to want to end the campaign talking about how much he will shrink the federal government. He's certainly not running as a gun-grabber.
The same issue of the Nation carries a notably tepid endorsement of Gore. Actually, it's not even an endorsement. The Nation's advice to leftists around the country is to vote for Gore only in states that are "too close to call," and elsewhere to vote for Ralph Nader.
Ralph Nader. Nader is truly, as Michael Kelly remarked after the 1996 election, the nadir. He speaks for a populism that is utterly hostile to the public -- its values, its tastes, above all its expressed political preferences. The groups the Left considers the most oppressed, such as blacks and the poor, are the least likely elements of the Democratic coalition to support Nader. His supporters explain this fact away by referring to the effects of propaganda, corporate power, and the like: "false consciousness," as the Marxists used to say. For the Left, the masses are lambs always led to the slaughter.
It is not surprising that so many of Nader's supporters are in the academy. For a generation, the professoriate has been enthralled by Michel Foucault's vision of an oppression so powerful and all-encompassing that it becomes, in the end, inescapable. Kenneth Minogue, the political philosopher, has argued that Foucault is part of a leftist tradition that grew more shrill in its certitude that society is unjust the richer and fairer the West became. Surrounded by opulence, the Left stages a drama of oppression but cannot really imagine a liberation. As Foucault so Nader. He offers a watered-down Marxist critique of the economic order, without any real program to change it.
It's easy to understand how Nader has driven Gore partisans on the Left to distraction. (Among the odd effects: Joe Conason, in a column castigating Nader supporters for helping the awful George W. Bush, refers to Bush adviser Condoleezza Rice as "the Clarence Thomas of foreign policy." No doubt he means she's a bold and principled thinker.) They cannot understand why their comrades-in-arms are attracted to Nader when right-wingers are not following Buchanan. But the answer is simple: The Right is hungrier. It isn't backing Buchanan for the same reason there was no left-wing counterpart to him in 1992. There may also be a desire among leftists to purge themselves of the Clinton years. They have had a lot to put up with, a lot to defend.
Should Joe Conason and Gloria Steinem and Jesse Jackson be worried about Nader? Our own guess is that his campaign cannot have a major effect on the race. When he grows strong enough to tip states to Bush, the press coverage of that fact will make leftists less likely to vote for him. (If leftists follow the Nation's advice, the consequence will be to eliminate the only serious support Nader has, in the Pacific Northwest.) His best hope for getting votes is if Bush pulls so far ahead of Gore over the next week that a vote for Gore looks like as much of a waste as a vote for Nader.
The Nation's editorial argues, essentially, that there is a public hunger for Naderite politics. Tens of thousands of people, "many of them young," have paid to listen to Nader denounce "corporate child molesters" and other such hobgoblins. But it may be instructive in this regard to note that the big debate among Democrats has been whether to use Bill Clinton, who is supposed to be to Gore's right, to rally the Democratic base for Gore. As Fred Barnes remarked some years back, there is no Left in American presidential politics. Something for Gore to ponder as he goes to sleep at night, counting the metaphors for loss.>>
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