Home | Away

Tuesday, April 13, 2004

Last words on Nader

Yes, these are the very last words I’m going to spend on Ralph Nader.  The last 2500.  Here they are, in syntactical order:

--Very deep breath.--

Over the past two weeks, I’ve revised an essay (between copyediting and page proofs); put together a special-session proposal for the 2004 MLA convention in Philadelphia; read and handed back ten ten-page essay drafts from my seminar students; filed my taxes; reviewed someone for promotion and tenure; read a dissertation proposal; read another dissertation proposal; beaten my email inbox down from 40 items to 5; and, of course, prepared my usual classes (Kindred and Beloved in the African-American novel class, Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic and Simon Frith’s Performing Rites in the cultural studies seminar) and played my usual hockey games (still struggling in the A division, still just shy of 50 goals for the year in the B).  Today represents my first respite in a long, long time.

That’s why the blogging has been kind of halfhearted and sporadic here and there—it’s really something of a luxury, and I certainly didn’t have the chance to cover Condi in real time on Thursday or follow the administration’s increasingly hallucinatory renderings of that August 6 memo since then.  Instead, on Friday I took a bit of week-old news about Ralph Nader “reaching out” to conservatives, and over the weekend I just worked, worked, worked.  (Janet and the kids were in Connecticut w/her family for the Easter weekend, and for the first time since we moved to central Pennsylvania I had a weekend alone in this house. Completely weird.) I knew, of course, that in posting something on Nader I would draw fire from certain predictable quarters, and these predictable quarters have reminded me that my sporadic Nader commentaries have generated a small clump of bizarre, missing-the-point complaints from any number of people who have decided, for reasons that continue to escape me, that their opposition to Bush is so pure and so righteous that it cannot be compromised by the idea of supporting a liberal Democrat for the Presidency.

So let me take the Nader complaints seriously, as part of my ongoing effort to get Nader supporters to stop being Nader supporters.  And I’ll say at the outset what should go without saying: of course Ralph should run if he wants to.  So should everyone else who wants to, including LaRouche and Perot and David McReynolds and John Hagelin and Alan Keyes.  But you shouldn’t vote for any of these guys.

On April 7, Tyler Dixon (with Whitney Trettien) wrote, “In a fit of finger-pointing blog entries, well-respected writers such as Michael Berube and Max Sawicky have even fatuously alluded to a conspiracy theory:  apparently Ralph Nader intentionally tipped the election to Bush, for reasons known only to him and his wacky co-conspirators.”

I presume that Dixon and Trettien are referring to this post, in which I noted that Ralph Nader himself said that he would prefer Bush to Gore in 2000.  All I did was quote from this June 2000 issue of Outside magazine:

If California tips Green enough, Bush could win the state and the whole damn election.  Which, Nader confided to Outside in June, wouldn’t be so bad. When asked if someone put a gun to his head and told him to vote for either Gore or Bush, which he would choose, Nader answered without hesitation: “Bush.”

Let’s start with some very basic points.  Thing one: there’s no conspiracy here, folks.  To have a conspiracy—or to allege that people like me have alleged a conspiracy—you need more than one person.  I never said that Nader conspired with anyone to put Bush in office; I said merely that he tried to swing the election to Bush.  Those of you who were actually paying attention in 2000 (and remember, I hold Nader voters to a higher standard on this count than I do the centrist fools who didn’t like Gore claiming that he invented the Internet while writing Love Story, because I pay Nader voters the compliment of taking their political self-representations at face value) will remember that Nader initially agreed not to campaign in “swing states” in the weeks preceding the election if it looked as if his candidacy would hurt Gore—and then he betrayed that pledge, campaigning almost exclusively in swing states in October and November.  Why?  Because like many of his supporters, he despised Gore more than he disliked Bush. 

Perhaps Dixon and Trettien were getting their information from one Curtiss Leung over at Hector Rottweiler Jr.’s blog, who wrote back in February, “There’s great distemper among liberals over Ralph Nader’s candidacy.  Michael Bérubé, going farther than the untenable thesis that Nader cost Gore the election, quotes Nader out of context to support the conspiracy theory that Nader intended to throw the election to Bush.”

Now, this is hard to believe.  I quoted Nader out of context?  The man said he would vote for Bush, I quoted him saying he would vote for Bush.  Exactly how much context do we need here?  Ah, but Curtiss thinks that this line from Ralph is the key:

“If you want the parties to diverge from one another, have Bush win.”

Curtiss thinks this “not only gives the lie to Bérubé’s thesis, but is eerily precient [sic].” But holy Jesus in an Easter basket, folks, Curtiss has got to be kidding.  First of all, Ralph subscribes here precisely to the Leninist “the worse the better” thesis for which progressives like me criticized him in 2000: Bush should win because he will heighten the contradictions and further shred the welfare state, yadda yadda yadda, thus leading to a renewal of the American left once people realize how bad things can get.  As many (but not quite enough) serious progressives argued four years ago, this line of thinking didn’t work in 1980-84 (or in 1968-72) and it won’t work now.  Second, what’s all this about the parties diverging, anyway?  Isn’t Ralph running today on nothing other than the argument that they have not diverged enough?  How can Ralph have been “precient” about this in such a way as to require him to run for President yet again?  And third, “divergence” in and of itself is not a value; it needs to be supplemented by the possibility that the newly divergent Democrats will actually beat their opponents.  What’s the point of fostering “divergence” if the result is a feral Tom DeLay GOP that controls the entire country and a feeble liberal-progressive Democratic party that controls a few cities and college towns?  “Ah, yes, we’re completely powerless, except for that tough new recycling law in Madison, Wisconsin,” the Curtisses will say in 2012 when the parties have diverged a little more to their liking, “but at least we know now that our opposition is truly oppositional.”

And as for that “untenable thesis that Nader cost Gore the election,” I’m finding it as hard to speak to certain Naderites about this as it is to speak to Bushies about their man’s National Guard service.  The layers of denial are just so impervious to empirical demonstrations.  But as far as I’m concerned, this study settles the question.  Don’t even try to address Nader’s impact on the 2000 election if you haven’t read it.

I’m beginning to wonder, though, whether I should continue to think of this debate in terms of rationality and empirical demonstrations.  When I think back to my experience in the well-beyond-alternative-rock scene in the 1980s, I start to believe that the Nader/Green phenomenon has to be understood in affective rather than rational terms.  The affective argument runs something like this: The problem with Democrats is that they’re complete corporate sellouts, man, just like Hüsker Dü when they released Flip Your Wig in 1985. Yes, that’s right, Hüsker Dü were sellouts—that was the consensus of the crowd I ran with.  (Note to Bob Mould:  I like your blog and I’ve always liked Flip Your Wig.  I argued with those people, I swear I did.) In fact, anybody with a record contract was probably a sellout, unless they’d signed with a very pure and very independent label.  SST was sufficiently cool as a label, yes, but Flip Your Wig included songs that had melodies, so it was back to Zen Arcade for the purists among us.  Ian MacKaye was of course our hero (and he sang backup on my band Baby Opaque’s cover of “Long Black Veil” in 1984, which got lots of college-radio airplay and afforded me my one brief encounter with alt-rock legend), because his bands, Minor Threat and Fugazi, and his label, Dischord, were completely DIY-anarcho-syndicalist-utopian affairs, utterly outside the influence of mass media and their Demoblican duopoly over our lives.  As for everybody else, the virtue of any one artist could be gauged by his or her distance from the machinery of mainstream commercial success.  It was a simple guide to life, but it had its consolations.

And let’s not forget the corollary: for the very pure left, as for the very pure alt-rock crowd, nothing fails like success.  If you’re really alternative, you have to stay alternative, even if the mainstream changes as a result of all your hard work.  That’s why, back in the 1980s, we never thought of the alt-rock scene as “having influence” on mainstream culture; on the contrary, we thought of mainstream culture as “co-opting” the alternative scene.  That’s also why there’s no point in having our man Nader run in the primaries in order to push the Democratic nominee to the left, dude—he’d only co-opt our issues and sell us out, man.  To be a true alternative, Nader has to stay outside the system—it’s the only way to live.

As an attitude toward commercial music culture, this kind of thing is fairly harmless—just a bit adolescent and simplistic, and more than a bit self-congratulatory.  But mostly harmless.  As an attitude toward electoral politics, however, it’s just not remotely serious or responsible.

Now to turn to Chun the Unavoidable, who certainly presents himself as serious and responsible, and who has recently taken issue with this post of mine, calling it a piece of “callow mockery” and insisting that Nader’s appeal to conservatives is “actually very shrewd.” But once again, the Nader fans miss the point, and this time I thought the point was a simple one.

So, in two paragraphs, here’s the point. 

As his open letter reminds us, Nader is a terrible candidate. Yes, he’s “on the left,” but he belongs to a nasty, authoritarian, crypto-conservative left that wants people to stop playing those violent video games and stop looking at sexually explicit images.  He’s not too concerned about women’s reproductive rights, as we all know, but he is very worried about the decline of parental authority in Today’s Modern World.  Hence his “appeal” to conservatives.  (And look again at his praise for the Texas GOP—that’s right, the same Texas GOP that gave you that outrageous mid-term redistricting!) But back in the real world, conservatives are far too politically savvy to fall for “appeals” like this; unlike their counterparts on the left, they didn’t break ranks in 2000 in favor of Pat Buchanan or an “independent” Alan Keyes/Gary Bauer candidacy, and they’re not going to break ranks now.  They’re not going to punish Bush for supporting amnesty for illegal Hispanic immigrants from Mars, or for running up a $500 billion deficit and lying about Medicare.  They know what side their bread is oiled on.  Nader’s open letter to them is just another of Ralph’s exercises in self-delusion.  Which brings me to . . .

Nader would be a terrible President. He has no experience in elected office and nothing but disdain for people with that experience.  He wouldn’t be able to get a budget—or a single damn piece of legislation—through this Congress.  He’d be able to declaim, yes, and personally, even I would thrill to a couple of his denunciations of this or that, as I did in 2000 when he spoke of the insanity of our drug laws and the disgraceful fact that we have two million prisoners behind bars, many of whom have been incarcerated for casual drug use not far removed from that of the youthful Bush or Gore. But he wouldn’t be able to do a blessed thing about any of it.

Now, I will occasionally support a third-party candidate on principle, and I have done so in the past.  But not Ralph.  My opposition to him is not the opposition of some craven ex-indie-leftist who’s decided to come in from the cold, sign with Sony-Columbia Records and put out a “crossover” record with Tom Petty.  My opposition to Ralph is based both on his form and his substance, neither of which I like.  If we had a credible protest candidate—a Russ Feingold, say, or maybe Lani Guinier on a Voting Rights ticket—and if we were talking about the elections of 1988 or 1996 instead of an election involving the most right-wing President in over a century, then I’d consider leaving the Democrats, as I did when I joined the New Party in 1996.  But I ain’t doing it for Ralph—not in 2000, not now, not ever.

So, then, in conclusion: the six percent of you who are still showing up as Nader supporters in national polls need to check yourselves on two counts.  One: are you voting for Nader because you actually think he’s the best available candidate?  If so, keep looking.  Seriously, if you’re going to throw away your vote, throw it at a better person. Two: are you voting for Nader in order to lodge a protest against the duopoly of American politics?  Very well, but then, your support for any unelectable fringe candidate will send exactly the same “message.” Remember, there’s no “movement” behind Nader this time, no pretense that he can pull five percent for the Greens nationally and get them federal matching funds so that they can follow the national-third-party path laid out most recently by Ross Perot’s Reform Party.  There’s just Ralph.  So you might as well vote for the Constitution Party or the Socialist Workers Party or the Natural Law Party—and remember, if you sign up for John Hagelin’s campaign on the Natural Law ticket, you also get all of Hagelin’s news bulletins from other solar systems, free of charge.  And that Vedic Defense Shield of his is really pretty awesome when you think about it.

As for how I could support a third-party candidate in a country that is shackled with a thoroughly undemocratic electoral system in which third-party candidates are assured of being protest candidates and nothing more, that will have to wait for a followup post, in which I take the Lani Guinier reference and run with it a bit longer.

Posted by Michael on 04/13 at 08:51 AM
(0) Trackbacks • Permalink
Page 1 of 1 pages