> Bingo. Why do left Naderites have such a hard time recognizing this?
> It's both painful and amusing to hear self-identified Marxists claiming
> they're doing the Red thing by voting for this petit bourgeois. When I
> brought this up the other week with Anthony Arnove of the ISO, he just
> dismissed it mockingly and refused to engage any further.
> Doug
Colorado state chair for Nader is an unpaid old hippie. What kind of campaign has unpaid staff in the lead position? Not Ready For Prime Time Players?
http://www.progressive.org/nov04/conn1104.html
> ...How many of these folks voted for Nader in 2000? I asked the group.
> Two of the students giggled. "We were fourteen in 2000," one said. The
> rest had voted for Nader--except for Linville, who voted for Gore in
> 2000. He was radicalized after September 11 by the war in Afghanistan,
> and after marching against the war, joined the International Socialist
> Organization. The ISO endorsed Nader, and Linville volunteered to be
> state coordinator of his campaign. When the campaign is over, he plans
> to become a high school history teacher.
Linville gives chapter and verse from the Nader bible: the rise of movements throughout American history; the corporate takeover of the Democratic Party; the need for an independent force for social change. This campaign "is about the AFL spending $60 million on the Democrats and not organizing Wal-Mart," he said. "It's about LBGT groups giving all this money to the Democratic Party, which is responsible for don't-ask-don't-tell, and the Defense of Marriage Act." In Wisconsin, Linville says disgustedly, leftwing Democrats urged activists to drop pressure for gay marriage legislation because it wasn't good for the party. "By these groups and institutions supporting the Democrats, their ideas become muted. You have to take more and more concessions as you shill for the Democrats," he said.
But it's a pretty serious thing to do to be getting Nader on the ballot in a swing state. Given that he isn't building any immediate third party alternative to the Democrats, does it really make sense?
Linville got angry. "I think it's a serious thing for a progressive to vote for Kerry," he said, rattling off Kerry's regressive stands on Iraq, U.S. militarism, and corporate tax breaks. "You're asking me to connect the dots, but no one connects the dots. No one stopped and said, 'What will you do after the sit-in?' during the anti-Vietnam War movement. It's about starting something."
Linville and Paul Heideman, the head of Students for Nader, a friendly guy with a mop of red curls and a Shakespeare T-shirt, both quoted Howard Zinn to me: "It's not important who's sitting in the White House, it's who's sitting in." But, of course, Zinn recently signed the letter urging swing-state voters to get Bush out of the White House.
The Students for Nader are impatient with such a cautious approach.
Matt Goins, a junior in the philosophy department, who compared the Democrats to the mafia "without the killings," said, about reelecting Bush, "It's irrelevant."
Heideman took a gentler tone. "We shouldn't belittle it, but it's not as important as building a movement," he said.
Alycia Sellie, a library-science graduate student who was organizing a 'zine fest in town, said, "I don't want to support either party, because they don't represent me. I don't believe in the two party system."
(This was followed by a lot of head-shaking in the group about how many 'zines and punk rockers are apparently backing Kerry.)...<SNIP>
Can't one criticize the Democrats and still not organize voters in a swing state so that Bush may well win four more years? They debated the point passionately.
"Every single one of us is involved in a social movement, but they're dead because of folding into the Kerry campaign!" said ISO member Laura Nelson. The other students agreed: stopping the war, gay marriage, and other causes have been abandoned as activists fall in line with Kerry. The goal of the Nader campaign, they said, is to force these movements to break
from the party that has hijacked their ideals.
You have to hand it to these young people. They're idealistic, and they are running uphill to do what they think is right.
Nader blamed not only the Democrats, but also the "liberal intelligentsia," including The Progressive magazine. "They're so freaked out by Bush, they make the following mantra: 'Anybody but Bush,' not making any demands on Kerry. If John Kerry loses to this craven regime in Washington, he'll lose because the liberals abdicated responsibility to make him a more popular, go-getting Democrat. It's almost as if they're ashamed of what they're advocating."
To the Democrats, he said, "Throw in the towel. Give up. Step aside. Let the younger generation that sees through the sham take over."
And to the audience: "This is a decadent party. This is a decaying party. You can watch it, or you can do something. Try to give it a jolt, as we're doing. Make demands on it. But do something."
This is the same message that was so galvanizing in 2000 when Nader packed Madison Square Garden, and so many other venues, talking to people eager to help build the grassroots movement he envisioned. What has happened since then?
Eddie Vedder, Bonnie Raitt, and other entertainers who were on stage with Nader are out playing anti-Bush events. Nader derided Michael Moore in his speech for getting down on his knees and begging him not to run. ("Don't grovel . . . . Stand up for justice," he said.)
Has the dream died? Has the left given up? Are Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, and Barbara Ehrenreich really just "scared liberals," as Nader called them in his reply to their recent statement?
"It's hard to dismiss them as corporate Democrats," says Jeff Cohen, former head of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, who helped put together the statement to swing-state voters. "Clearly, I don't think people signed this because they think the Democratic leadership under Kerry is dramatically better than the Democratic leadership under Gore," Cohen says. "It's because the Republicans are worse than anyone imagined."
The optimistic feeling many on the left had in 2000 is almost hard to recall now. The country has taken such a hard turn to the right since then. Bush seemed like a bumbler who couldn't win. If elected, he might, as Ehrenreich put it, "while away his Presidency on the elliptical trainer." Activists were fed up with Democratic retreat on issues like welfare reform and corporate control of the media. People believed, as Cohen says, that it was a good time for a "center-left" strategy: helping to build a strong Green Party to put pressure on the corporate Democrats who were running things.
Bush's regime, September 11, and its aftermath changed everything. The most devastating aspect of the Republican regime, it seems to me, is its lawless militarism, which is spreading a toxic hatred of America around the globe. Linville snorts at this: "I'm glad America is hated," he said. "I think the U.S. should shut down all its military bases abroad."
To the young people supporting Nader today, Bush is the status quo--not some freakish aberration. They see the preemptive war in Iraq as an extension of Clinton's bombing of a pharmaceutical plant in Sudan. They see Dennis Kucinich, the leftmost Democrat, as a sellout, whose campaign was designed, from the beginning, to coopt the anti-war movement. (The ISO website calls Kucinich a "bagman" for Kerry.)
"Some of that rhetoric made sense to me decades ago, but when I hear it today it seems like it's wanting me to conflate Barbara Lee and Dennis Kucinich with Joe Lieberman," says Cohen. "It's not meaningful."
As for Howard Zinn and that quote of his the Nader backers repeated to me: "That quote is a little misleading, because it suggests I don't care who's in the White House," Zinn said, when I reached him by phone. "I'm arguing that social action is more important. But it doesn't mean that who's in the White House is of zero importance." Having Bush in charge of the world's mightiest war machine is too dangerous, he says.
About Nader, Zinn said, "He's been seduced by the last thing in the world he should be seduced by, which is electoral politics. He's not about that. He's about movement politics."
Zinn is sympathetic with Nader's supporters.
"The Democratic Party is a pitiful example of an opposition. And when you look at what Kerry stands for and what Nader stands for, I understand perfectly why people might find it repugnant to vote for Kerry and not for Nader. . . . I'm sort of with them emotionally.
"But," he continues, "I think that in this election they, too, are placing too much stock in the election itself, thinking it's very important for people to mark their ballots for Nader. That's not the most important thing. The most important thing is carrying on the issues he stands for."
In fact, if Nader gets less than he did last time, Zinn thinks it gives an erroneous picture of how much support there is for what he stands for--causes that a majority of Americans actually agree with.
The election will be over soon. The effect of Nader's run may be to help drive the country further to the right. But I like Zinn's optimism. I hope his students, and Nader's, bring about the massive social change they, and their mentors, still believe in.
Ruth Conniff is Political Editor of The Progressive.
-- Michael Pugliese