<< Why not focus on Gore's inability to inspire the Green voters? Reminds me of the 8 track tape CEO getting mad at the consumers because they didn't like it when songs got chopped up between tracks.
Gore didn't own these votes. It was up to him to earn them. He failed. >>
I agree that many of the Green voters and activists are either potential DSA members, or actual members.
Then why the hostility? That is, aside from the usual hostilities expressed in every disagreement in the left, which arises because so many on the left are there for primarily moral reasons -- therefore anyone who disagrees with them must, per se, be immoral?
Well, first many Greens, starting with their candidate, made two statements throughout the campaign -- 1. it would make no difference who won the election; 2. anyone on the left who didn't support them was either a knave ("bought off" by the Democrats) or a fool (in a masochistic relationship with the Democrats). Not surprisingly, when everything that has happened since the election shows that point one was wrong, and when point two was deliberately insulting, there tends to be a reaction.
But, ironically, that's not the serious issue at hand.
Eric's point above shows something far more important and far more negative about the Nader campaign, a remarkable individualist tendency which ignores the social forces at work. As numerous pieces, by me and just about everyone else, have shown, the nature of the coalitions backing Gore and Bush could not have been more different.
In the great social war between the pro-choice, pro-environment, pro-union, multicultural, social democratic urban America, and the anti-feminist, anti-gay, anti-union, anti-environmentalist monocultural rural America, the Nader folks and their candidate did everything they could to ensure the victory of the second group.
After succeeding in this endeavor, why would they not expect most of the soldiers, let alone the commanders, of the first army to feel that they had been active traitors?
As a matter of fact, Nader's strategy was worse than a crime, it was a blunder. Had Gore won, the continued adherence of his policies to the DLC line would have won more recruits for the Greens next time. Now that Bush is President, the Green vote will be squeezed in the next Presidential election far more than it was in this one. They can expect to happen to them what happened to Pat Buchanan this time -- the Buchanan vote was only a fraction of those who agreed with Buchanan, because the great majority of those voters were more determined to defeat the Democrats than anything else.
Nader issued a frontal challenge to all the leaders of the organizations of the broad Left -- whether unions, minorities, pro-choicers, environmentalists, etc. -- in effect denying their legitimacy to speak for their constituencies, or even that their constituencies had anything at risk. His defense of his position was that James Watt as Sec. of the Interior meant that the Sierra Club grew! Talk about missing the point! -- the breaking of the PATCO strike had far more consequences for the social balance of power than the size of the Sierra Club.
What was at stake in the election -- and what will be at stake in the next couple of elections is not a moral judgment of the righteousness (or leftishness) of the candidates, either personally or ideologically. What continues to be at stake is the broad question of social power in the society.
Ironically, the long march to victory of the Right that began in the 1966 elections and culminated in the 1994 elections began to unravel in the Gingrich-Clinton confrontation in 1995-6. There's a reason that this was the most rhetorically left-wing election since 1972.
I believe (and most of the potential constituencies of the left agree with me) that Nader's 2000 run was what used to be called "adventurism." Now, of course, all of us may be wrong, but the great wisdom of this campaign or of a continued strategy of dividing the Left between the college campuses and just about everyone else (which is essentially what Nader did) seems just a bad imitation of SDS "strategy" circa 1968.
Jim Chapin
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 lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass --
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