Ralph Nader recently came to my neck of the woods to campaign for the Green Party mayor of New Paltz, New York. The venue was the Rosendale Cinema, a small-town, single-screen theater where everyone I do or don’t want to see comes to watch indie films and eat popcorn. This night they were showing An Unreasonable Man, the new documentary about Nader’s career, and charging $15 to benefit Mayor Jason West’s campaign. Sadly, however, the man who had pulled audiences of 10,000 and more during his 2000 presidential run couldn’t fill but half the theater. It seems that folks, even here in the heartland of the American counterculture, are angrier at Nader for his ‘betrayal’ in 2000 and 2004 than at Al Gore for his wan, ineffectual campaign, or at John Kerry for inaugurating his run with a ludicrous military salute instead of a serious national health insurance plan.

I figured the slim crowd would enable me to ask a few questions, mostly of the “how-could-you?” variety.
 

I wanted to know why Nader hadn’t run as a Democrat in either election, so that he could dominate the primary debates, spread his messages to millions of people, and actually do well enough at the polls to become a force in the Democratic Party, perhaps even gain a Cabinet post.

What, like Dennis Kucinich?

I wanted to know if Nader’s faith in the American system’s structural respon-siveness to citizen action is still intact after six years of Bush-Cheney rule, deregulation, media consolidation, assaults on the Constitution, and heightened corporate power.

I wanted to know if he believes our country can take yet another round of Republican War Party rule while he attempts to make the Democrats accountable to their working-class base. I understand the strategy: to make the Dems unelectable until they are willing to tear themselves from the arms of corporate lobbyists and work, instead, for the economic well-being of the majority. But I also know that it took Christian conservatives twenty or more years to work a similar strategy within the Republican Party before gaining veto power over judicial nominations and significant influence within many federal agencies. Does Nader think that America and the world beyond can endure another round of the greater of two evils while the left works to reform the Democrats through a ‘tough love’ campaign?

Yeah, but what have the ‘lesser evils’ from Kennedy to Clinton established as a legacy for the majority — beyond civil rights concessions that they couldn’t avoid making to mobilized mass movements? Did they repeal Taft-Hartley? Make it harder for companies to abandon communities? Establish a living wage? Tame the Pentagon?

As I sat there debating myself, An Unreasonable Man reminded me why I used to admire Ralph Nader so greatly. It showed a man of sharp intelligence, utmost integrity, and an extremely practical cast of mind, who has doggedly acted on his belief that the American system will be responsive to social justice activists. (“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world,” wrote George Bernard Shaw in Man and Superman, quoted as an epigraph for the film, while “the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”) As a result of that doggedness, we have gained, in my short lifetime, seat belts, air bags, food labeling, the Environmental Protection Agency, federal standards for worker safety, the Freedom of Information Act, a freeze on nuclear power plant construction, and an abiding public belief, still resistant to conservative attack, that the government has an obligation to defend the people against the abuses of Big Business and to preserve some degree of transparency in its operations.

As Mark Green, a former ‘Nader’s Raider,’ commented in the film, Nader actually believes in the American legal system, the Constitution, and our potential for establishing an active, working democracy. Such beliefs, in my more radical days, actually made Nader into a “reformist” in my eyes ­— yet his faith always tugged at me, summoning me from the loneliness of ‘revolutionary’ oppositional thinking towards a more patriotic, populist, and hopeful stance.

Nu, who’s the reformist now?

An Unreasonable Man also showed a man marginalized by the conservative counterrevolution that began with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. The film lingered especially on Nader’s betrayal by the Democrats, whose bigwigs in 1987 cooperated with the Republicans in creating the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), a corporate-sponsored project that took over from the League of Women Voters to run future presidential debates. In 1996, the CPD excluded Ross Perot, despite his having won 19 percent of the vote four years earlier. In 2000, they not only excluded Nader from the debates, but had him barred by state police from even attending. Nader sued, of course, and won an apology, but no change in CPD policy. Watching these events unfold on screen, I couldn’t help thinking that his willingness to undermine the Democrats wasn’t, at least in part, a matter of vengeance.

Nevertheless, when I contemplate Nader’s candidacies, it is the sorely compromised state of our democracy, more than his wrongheadedness, that stands out to me: how it didn’t matter a whit whether I voted for him in 2000 because the only votes that matter any more in presidential elections are in a handful of contested states; how corporate lobbyists now write most of our laws, while money, far more than any other factor, determines who is taken seriously as a candidate; how Hillary Rodham Clinton was crowned by Democratic powerbrokers as the frontrunner more than a year before the present campaign began, though the polls show her to be barely electable; how John Edwards, in running a pro-labor, populist campaign, somehow seems ‘old-fashioned’; how presidential debates, like sporting events, are now sponsored by beer companies.

Would I prefer any of the Democrats to Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain, Newt Gingrich or some other Republican corporate toady in 2008? Of course. I’d like the president of the United States to believe in evolution and be willing to say so. I’d like a president who will not consult with Pat Robertson before nominating judges and justices. I’d like a president who will prevent religious interference with scientific research. I’d like a president who would oppose a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.

The main reason that ‘culture war’ issues motivate my vote, however, is because I expect neither party to make much difference economically. Neither is going to give significant relief to the fifty million Americans who earn under $10 an hour for their labors. Neither is going to prosecute Exxon-Mobil for making windfall profits while gas hovers at $3 a gallon, or Citigroup for its years of predatory mortgage lending. Neither is going to introduce honest contracting to the Pentagon’s armaments business.

Neither party will force pharmaceutical giants, despite the massive public funding of research, to make drugs affordable for the elderly poor. Neither will force large-scale realty companies that build luxury housing to build low- and mixed-income developments as well. Neither will address, with both rhetoric and resources, the crisis of poverty, failed education, and imprisonment that confronts the living descendants of African-American slaves. Neither will rehabilitate the one-out-of-three public schools that the General Accounting Office describes as “in need of extensive repair or replacement.”

In fact, neither the Republican nor the Democratic establishment will ultimately encourage the nomination of a candidate willing to campaign on the issue of corporate power, or to inform the public about it — as Ralph Nader does at sites like www.nader.org  or on his Cutting Corporate Welfare page.

Nader arrived at the Rosendale Cinema about half an hour after the film ended. He heartily endorsed Jason West (who subsequently lost the election), made a few remarks about the film, and then fielded questions from the audience. By the time I got to ask mine, my “how-could-you?” orientation had shifted to a self-examining “how come I don’t?” ­— in response to Nader’s practical, concrete comments about political activism. The man talks action as much as he talks issues: Within ten minutes, he had suggested a dozen things we could do, without going to jail or bankrupting ourselves or missing our favorite television program, to lubricate the levers of democracy. For example, he suggested, if there were a tenth as many committed “Congress watchers” as bird watchers in the U.S., the stranglehold of corporate lobbyists would be broken. “Get a group of ten Congress watchers, and your representative will take your call. If you get a group of fifty, your representative will call you,” he promised.

Perhaps if more of us were motivated enough to quit our handwringing and become active citizens, we could conjure up some Democratic accountability and courage and not have to worry at all about the 2008 election — which should be a cakewalk for the Dems, given the Bush-Cheney record. So: Want to Stop Ralph Nader? Get involved, truly involved. He’d be glad to show you how.