WHY NOT NADER?
America's left is in a froth over the candidacy of Ralph Nader, the veteran anti-corporate activist, who threatens to cost Democrat John Kerry the election. The vitriol of the anti-Nader campaign is all the more curious since many of those now urging him to stand down are his supporters from the 2000 elections.
More strikingly, Nader is the only candidate who supports the left's goal of withdrawing from Iraq. While super-patriot John Kerry has only committed himself to getting European support for the policing action in Iraq, Nader consistently opposed the war.
The scorn Nader's candidacy is all about arithmetic and nothing to do with principle. It is widely thought that Nader cost Al Gore the election in 2000, and helped George Bush to the White House. Bush, say American radicals, is the greater evil, against which you have to support the lesser evil, Kerry. Nader says that Kerry is just as bad as Bush - a point that it is hard to gainsay, especially on the core issues of the election. Kerry loses more votes for Kerry than Nader does, says Nader.
The radical Kerry supporters point out that much of Nader's platform - like keeping American jobs for American workers echoes key parts of the right-wing platform of Pat Buchanan. And they say that Republicans are surreptitiously supporting Nader.
Nader's platform is the reason not to vote for Nader. It is backward-looking and hostile to economic progress. It is inwardly nationalistic and insular. Even the opposition to the war comes as an expression of a desire to withdraw from international connections and draw down the shutters.
But Nader's platform was just as bad in 2000 as it is in 2004. The difference for the radical Kerry supporters is that in 2000 they learned that there is no such thing as a protest vote. They think that in supporting Kerry they are using their votes to make a difference. But they are not. They are giving up their independent influence on events to turn themselves into Kerry's cheerleaders.
Better to abstain at the ballot box than to endorse any of the three choices before the American people. Voting for someone you do not support is the real abstention.
SCHOOLS DO NOT TEACH
As the Labour Party looks around for a domestic policy education is back on the agenda. But Labour's big spending on education turned out to have little to do with teaching. Instead they opted for the symbolism of tarting up one or two schools. Now the architecture magazine Prospect reports that one such transformation, Kingsdale in South London, shows more signs of architectural doodling than real change.
'...the truth is that buildings do not teach children. Teachers do. The building programme the Government began in 1998 substitutes architecture for advances in education. Better buildings, by all means. But when future generations look back on dRMM's re-working of Kingsdale, it will strike them as at least as stuck in its own time as Lesley Martin's original.'
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