----- Original Message ----- From: "Seth Ackerman" <sia at nyc.rr.com> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Tuesday, February 05, 2002 10:09 PM Subject: Re: bad nooz for Dems
Ian Murray wrote:
> He helped mobilize people disgusted with the Republicrats. What
did
> you want him to do, win?
Well, I was hoping he could scare the Democrats a little. And don't get me wrong - they're scared. I could see the fear in Gephardt's eyes the other night when he promised not to repeal Bush's tax cut. Max might be right, though, when he says the Dems just need more scaring. Maybe another Nader run in 2004 could do the trick. In the popular memory, Bush won in 2000 because of the Supreme Court, not because of Nader, who was quickly forgotten in the Florida chad-war. Maybe that was just a fluke and future Nader runs will better concentrate Democrat minds.
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Well, the plasticity/manipulability of the US electorate attention span -itself a form of benign reification- makes causal explanations very difficult.
>
The argument I hate, though, is the one that says you can't blame
Nader for
Bush's victory. Of course you can blame him. People are responsible
for the
consequences of their actions. When Nader decided to run, he knew
that
putting his name on the ballot would - for whatever reasons -
induce a
certain number of people who might have voted for Gore to vote for
him
instead.
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Ok, but isn't that part and parcel of Democracy in the US? How many blame a random concatenation of 2 million random post Reagan Democrats for perpetuating their disillusion with the Dems. by voting for W. ?
That made it more likely that Bush would win. If Nader hadn't run, Gore almost certainly would be president. If Gore had gotten the votes of only a tiny percentage of Florida Nader voters, he would have won Florida. Again, it's possible throwing the election to Bush will, in retrospect, years from now, turn out to have done some good. But if the opposite turns out to be the case, then we Nader supporters have to accept some part of the responsibility. At the same time, the Democrats have to accept responsibility for driving so many people into the arms of Nader.
Seth
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That's the way it goes on Planet Zoon Politikon, no? If Gore had gotten a tiny % of voters in TN he would have won too; so causality is interminably contestable.
But down the road, the candidates who not only care the most about but know what to do about the social consequences of sexism-racism-classism-ecology-technology nexus etc. that taps and deals with the concerns and anxieties of voters until citizens feel confident enough to cast off the voter-representative form of collective action will have their brains filled to the brim. The onus is on citzens even more than they[we] care to admit...........
Ian