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Thursday, July 22, 2004

Obligatory followup

Yeah, well, even though I didn’t think Ralph was a particularly good candidate, and (as I’ve said before) didn’t think he would be a remotely plausible President (he’s never held an office, and, as his former associates have repeatedly pointed out, he does not play well with others), I too had my moments of being “excited” by him.  Late in the 2000 race, in (where else?) Madison, Wisconsin, Ralph was interviewed by Chris Matthews, who was a Raider back in the day before he became one of the barking dogs of cable news.  In that interview, conducted on the University of Wisconsin campus, Ralph said a couple of True Things I’d never heard a presidential candidate say in October: that our drug laws are insane, and that (relatedly) it is a travesty that we have two million of our fellow citizens locked up for small-time offenses which the rich not only can get away with in their callow youth, but can get away with in their callow youth and then fib about when they grow up to run for President.  At one point, Matthews asked Ralph about the so-called New Economy, and whether the Internet boom didn’t prove that a less regulated form of capitalism is more productive than those stuffy European forms, where states provide all those costly services and where unions still exist.  Ralph squashed that little neolib thought like a bug, pointing out that the success of the Internet was in fact a perfect example of a piece of infrastructure built by the state.  Thousands of U Wisconsin students and faculty, of course, ate it up.  And watching all this on TV, I had my moments, yes I did, of thinking, “you go, old man, you keep saying those True Things.  Stick it to ‘em.”

Then I snapped to, and said to myself, you know, if this old man had said these True Things in a Democratic primary, then not only would he have pushed the field to the left, as Howard Dean (and unexpectedly, given his record, John Edwards) did this year, but we progressives would have been spared the embarrassment of clustering around that nice liberal-centrist Bill Bradley in 1999 as if he were the second coming of RFK.

But we all know why Ralph wouldn’t run in the primary: the whole premise is that the system itself is broken, so there’s no point even attempting to play within it.  Well, as every savvy progressive and her brother has already pointed out, it’s a shame the New Right didn’t take that holy attitude toward the GOP, isn’t it.  Instead, they worked within it and took it overñ like good radicals, working from the roots up.  (Tom Frank’s What’s the Matter with Kansas? contains a fine account of how the Kansas GOP of Bob Dole and Nancy Kassebaum became the Kansas GOP of Sam Brownback and Pat Roberts and creationism in just over a decade.)

Very well, so why won’t progressive Naderites do the same thing?  Is it because they’re infantile, self-absorbed, clueless, orñ as one progressive Democrat has suggestedñ college-town yuppies who are insulated from the economic consequences of their actions?

I don’t think so.  I think Ralph’s appeal to his supporters works very much the way the underground music scene worksñ even for supporters who’ve never heard, or heard of, Mission of Burma or the White Stripes or the Fiery Furnaces (whose CD Nick gave me the other night, and is playing as I type, even though it’s not good “background” music).  One key: look back, over the years, at the fury with which Ralph has attacked associates who’ve “sold out” by going to work for federal agencies.  True Naderites love that shit: it’s one of the ways their man marks his territory.  And after all, working in the federal government does involve all manner of corruption and compromise.  It involves money and power and being implicated in some really nasty horse-trading and foul policy-making.  It’s not at all like working for a citizens’ group.  And I’m old enough to remember when the Clash were accused of “selling out” by playing a long stand at Bond’s in Times Square in 1981.  That’s right, they sold out by playing a big club.  As if that made them indistinguishable from REO Speedwagon.  But it was important for certain diehard Clash fans to mark their fandom in that way, by insisting that the Clash were the only band that mattered-- and that they would never do things that other bands did, like, um, play at Bond’s.  (For the record, the Clash picked as their opening acts a bunch of different local, underexposed bands.  And when it turned out that the show was oversold, they agreed to play extra gigs in order to honor all tickets, and wound up playing something like nine or ten shows.  Now, of course, that gig is legendary.  But nonetheless, at the time, I knew people who’d insisted they’d sold out.)

So when establishment Democrats came along in 2000 and told Naderites to get over themselves, to grow up, to tamp down their petty little passions and get acclimated to the real world of corruption and compromise, it didn’t work.  Actually, it had precisely the opposite effect: it confirmed Naderites’ sense that they were in fact messing with the system and sticking it to the man (and I don’t mean to belittle the idea of man-sticking: how many times has this blog wanted to stick it to Lieberman, after all?  And it’s not like I’ve forgotten who propelled the guy into national prominence, either.) Imagine some parental figure breaking into your room in 1988 and taking away all your H¸sker D¸ records and then saying, “very well, if you must listen to your music, hereñ I have some nice Huey Lewis and the News albums for you.  Now put on that sports jacket and grow upñ we’re going to the Dukakis rally, and you have to look presentable.” Woo woo, the Dukakis rally.  Can you feel the excitement?

The establishment-Democrat response is guaranteed to backfire, then, and anyone with any experience in any “alternative” community can tell you why.  What then of what I called the “savvy progressive” response, where people insist on the importance of the Cabinet positions and judicial appointments and regulatory agencies?  Why doesn’t that work either?

Because some Nader fans just aren’t working on that level.  They don’t care much for the prospect of reducing mercury emissions by ten percent (after the mercury ban gets blocked by the House GOP) or issuing new guidelines for the conditions under which repetitive-stress injury will be covered by Worker’s Comp and the ADA.  It’s not about the wonky detailsñ it’s about the fact that neither Gore nor Kerry inspires a bit of enthusiasm or excitement, and the reason they don’t inspire any enthusiasm or excitement is that they’ve spent a lifetime working for Incremental Change, Inc. while accepting campaign contributions from the Moderate Mercury Emissions industry.  Also, they never say anything about the insanity of our drug laws or the structural role of the state in propping up “free” enterprise, because, don’t you know, utterances like these are associated with the (decadent) intellectual leftñ they don’t poll well with swing voters, and might in fact lose 2.4 percent of the independent vote in suburban St. Louis.  Better for a New Democrat to propose school uniforms and a Defense of Marriage Act.

My point is that both establishment Democrats and progressives (myself included) have woefully underestimated the importance of visceral, affective, emotional factors in all this.  When people are profoundly disaffected from the party of Clinton/Gore, and think of it (not without reason) as the party of Dick Morris and David Gergen, you can’t snap them to attention by (a) insisting that Huey Lewis is the only music that responsible grownups listen to or (b) trying to scare them by arguing that George Bush will scorch their earth.

Am I saying that people to the left of the Democrats are irrational?  Not at all.  But I am saying that many of us want more than a New New Democrat white paper to go onñ we actually want to care about the candidate, we want to believe he’s worth our effort, we want to trust that he won’t take our support and use it to cut a deal with Bill Frist sometime next spring, knowing that we have Nowhere Else To Go.

This really isn’t a trivial matterñ and I say this as someone who’s underestimated the role of emotion in politics his entire life.  These days, I look back at some of the prominent Nader intellectuals’ enthusiasm in late 2000 and I’m mystifiedñ they truly believed that they had a mass protest movement on their hands, that they were seeing the groundswell of a decisive break with the plodding corporate Democrats they despised.  Seriously, go back and look at some of that stuff todayñ and I think you’ll wonder, as I did, all this hoohah for a guy who pulled 2.7 percent of the vote-- about one-third of Ross Perotís 8.4 percent in 1996? (Remember, Perot pulled 8.4 percent long after every sensible person had realized that the Weekly World News had it right all alongñ Perot was actually a member of the same species of creature that crash-landed near Roswell in 1947.  Who was still voting for him in 1996?  People like Dennis Miller, that’s who.  Miller was a piece of work long before 9/11, folksñ a passionate Perot man from way back in ‘92, and a fierce defender of good old Admiral James Stockdale.) But for some progressives, especially those of us in universities, it seemed exhilarating at the time: look!  millions of people agree with us! and our guy is on TV, stickin’ it to Chris Matthews! For those of us who are more used to having hundreds, or maybe dozens, of people agree with us, the idea of pulling three million votes for Nader was intoxicating.  Problem was, there were 102 million other voters involved, and that should’ve dampened anyone’s enthusiasm for The Movement.  But it didn’t, which suggests to me that in many respects, the enthusiasm for Nader 2000 significantly exceeded its object.

Democrats need to understand this. Even today, in his Perotian decline, Nader continues to pull three to five percent in polls.  I know it’s a small number, and it may not affect the outcome this time, but think about that: Bush has turned out to be worse than any Nader voter could have imagined; Nader is not running with the Greens; he’s working with far-right lunatics and lying about it; nearly every prominent progressive intellectual has publicly jumped shipñ and his support is still at the level it was four years ago.  As I said yesterday, I think The Nader Factor is doing exactly the right thing, by trying to channel some of that progressive-left passion into useful venues.  I don’t agree that Nader voters have to be “courted”: it’s not like we prolabor progressives have done them some terrible harm and now have to make it up to them.  But if the Democrats can’t figure out how to handle Nader progressives’ legitimate desires to care about the guy at the top of the ticketñ the legitimate desire to desireñ then we’re going to see something very much like a replay of the debacle of 2000.  And even if Kerry wins, can we afford to have three million permanently disaffected progressives, too alienated from the Democrats to care about taking back the party?

Next installment:  don’t ask me what it would take for me to leave the Democrats.  I left ‘em in 1995, to join the New Party, and now I’m back, because the Supreme Court shot down “fusion” ballots on the grounds that the two-party system, like the Terminator, cannot dismantle itself.

Posted by Michael on 07/22 at 04:14 AM
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