>"Whether you're inspired by a real enthusiasm for Nader,
>or merely want to lodge a defensible, effective protest vote,
>pulling the lever for Ralph where you can,
>or writing in his name where you can't,
>is probably the best you can do in 1996."
>
>Whereas in 2004, the retrospective judgement on Nader is
>"It was individualist
>adventurism and little else."
Yeah, I feel like I learned something in the last 8 years: that Nader failed to deliver on the promise of movement-building, and that some Republican administrations can be very very bad.
You negelected to quote this bit:
>But that contrast indirectly brings up the first of the unpleasant
>reservations about Nader: his refusal to address any of what pundits
>call the social issues. While Buchanan thrives on them, Nader is
>silent. He refuses to comment on abortion or affirmative action, and
>ducks any discussion of race relations, surely one of the most
>important political issues of the last, oh, 200 years. And he's
>rather repellently dismissed concerns about gay and lesbian rights
>as "gonadal politics," as if they weren't fundamental issues of both
>civil rights and human social life.
>
>And that contemptuous dismissal of gonads leads to another
>reservation about Nader: his humorless, hair-shirt personality. Of
>course, his joylessness is his own concern, but it informs his
>politics, which exude an austerity that sharply limits his appeal,
>mainly to the affluent and the voluntarily poor. Successful
>politicians, mainstream or radical, have to project optimism and a
>sense of liberation, rather than a hectoring tone that seems to
>promise only self-denial.
>
>Nadernomics
>
>For a campaign, if you can call it that, that foregrounds economic
>issues, Nader's economic analysis is actually quite thin. In fact,
>he's a prisoner of his own legalistic view of the world. He devoted
>over 1,000 words of his over-15,000-word acceptance speech to the
>beauties of litigation. He asked his audience, rhetorically, if they
>realized that "the two pillars of the American legal system are the
>Law of Torts and the Law of Contracts." Now of course he wasn't
>celebrating the right of one firm to sue another, but of citizens to
>sue corporations that wrong them. But he has far less to say about
>the systemic imperatives that lead corporations to manufacture
>exploding cars and to poison rivers - the drive to lower costs and
>fatten profits. Litigation is an individualized solution to broad
>economic and social conflicts whose proper arena is politics, not
>the courtroom.
>
>If Nader has ever ventured into serious economic analysis, he's kept
>the result well hidden. He denounces monopoly and promotes
>competition, without much apparent understanding of what these terms
>mean. There's little question that the economic scene today is more
>competitive than it was 20 or 40 years ago. Then, during the Golden
>Age, price leaders like U.S. Steel and GM set the terms for their
>industries, and smaller firms followed their cue; now, those orderly
>mechanisms have been replaced by a war of each against all. This is
>not to argue for a return to oligopoly, but it is to say that
>capitalist competition is a very nasty business. The increase in
>competition has resulted not only in an assault on labor and nature,
>but in an increasingly coarsened, atomized culture. Do Nader and his
>supporters really want to turn up the heat on that?
>
>Ralph as boss
>
>Now, Nader talks like a big friend of labor, but his history is a
>bit more complicated. In the early 1970s, his Raiders' work on
>transportation regulation treated unionized airline and trucking
>workers as among the beneficiaries of government-sanctioned
>monopolies; that work contributed importantly to the movement for
>deregulation of these industries, with disastrous effects on
>workers, later in the decade.
>
>Closer to home, Nader was the prime mover in a very ugly tale about
>a publication he founded, Multinational Monitor.
Etc.
My latest on Ralph: <http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Election2004.html>.
Doug