Civic avowal

Ralph Nader's new pamphlet prompts this revelation: Between the Uranian right and bourgeois left, Nader may be the moral choice, but he's still the wrong one.

Andrew O'Hehir

Oct 28, 2004 | In his new Tom Paine-manqué pamphlet, "Civic Arousal," Ralph Nader answers your letters. No, these aren't letters like: "Dear Asexual Awkward Consumer Advocate: My boyfriend is acting so weird!" That might be entertaining, or at least jolly -- things Nader has never allowed himself to become. This is about as jokey as Uncle Ralph gets, when he for some reason begins contemplating bird-watching amid his response to a bewildered waitress from Tallahassee, Fla., named Erika McVoy:

"Well, that is a nice, healthy, outdoors hobby, certainly one to be enjoyed while there are still different species of birds around. But I was possessed by a musing. What if, oh, what if that bird had flown down to Washington, D.C., and alighted on the Capitol dome of the U.S. Congress, followed by a rush of birders? Imagine if some of them then switched from bird-watching to Congress-watching ... oh well, just dreaming."

Yes, "Civic Arousal" bugs me, on a lot of levels. It's preachy, condescending and pretty much tone-deaf (none of which will surprise veteran Nader-watchers). It reflects no awareness on Nader's part that in 2004 the nation faces an exigent emergency that demands compromise even on the part of those who feel that the two-party system has become more blackened with disease than the valves of Dick Cheney's heart (and I share that belief). If Nader can't see that this year's election is basically Chirac vs. Le Pen, American-style -- a conflict between a more-or-less legitimate politician and a coterie of wacked-out zombies from the Seventh Planet, with the added complication that the Uranian undead actually hold power in this country -- then he's wandered off into his own private moral universe, following a keening radio frequency no one else can hear.

But I don't want to pile on Ralph Nader unnecessarily; this publication has done an excellent job of that, as it happens. There's something almost pathological about Democrats' fascination with Nader. As loopy as he has become, he still haunts their party like some combination of bad conscience and repressed Freudian desires. Virtually everything Nader says about the institutional Democratic Party's corruption, its soullessness and its abandonment of its roots is true. Furthermore, most Democrats to the left of Zell Miller know it's true at some level, and it is endless, self-lacerating torture for them.

Here is Nader, excoriating those "liberal-progressive Democratic Party adherents" who agree with him on the issues but urge him to shut up this time around: "These partisans are hostages to our electoral system, starting with the atavistic electoral college to a winner-take-all structure in which the two major parties find reassuring comfort. Apparently, instead of fighting against this ossified structure that strips huge numbers of actual voters of any representation" -- which means you and me, by the way, unless we live in one of the 10 or 12 states still being contested in this election -- "these partisans focus their ire on any small candidate who they feel may tip the balance. To compound the ironies, they want to silence the exercise of campaign speech by the very small candidates who can speak out and start a movement to rationalize distorted elections, so that those who win the most votes, as Al Gore did ... win the presidential election."

I suspect that one reason so many Democrats refuse to let go of the Nader-brought-us-Bush argument is because that narrative possesses an awful karmic justice. We sold our souls for power, we abandoned our alleged principles (they tell themselves) and became the other, wimpier party of Big Corporate Bucks -- and we still didn't win! It must be the doing of that lone weirdo out there on the left flank, the one who drones on and on about integrity and democracy and makes us feel so bad. A sort of dream-logic wish-fulfillment is at work: We deserved to lose, and Nader was the one who pointed that out.

It's time to come clean: I voted for Nader in 2000, more to support the idea of building up the Green Party than out of tremendous enthusiasm for the guy himself. While I personally have nothing to apologize for (I live in a state that hasn't been in play since 1984), those of us who argued that there was really no difference between Bush and Gore look pretty stupid now. None of that reflects especially well on Al Gore, by the way; it simply wasn't evident at that early date that the then-Texas governor was the real-world version of Greg Stillson, the born-again, world-destroying future president in Stephen King's "The Dead Zone."

Furthermore, fellow former Nadernauts, there's no point pretending that Ralph's presence on the ballot did not affect the results last time out. I was convinced of this by no less an authority than Bill Moyers, a political independent who has little time for the current Democratic Party. He says he told Nader that running as a third-party candidate in 2000 was assuming too large a historical responsibility, and that Nader's role ought to be organizing a grass-roots conquest of the party, in much the way that core Republican activists captured their party in the '80s.

Next Page: As Ralph himself fades into oddball irrelevance, his final legacy may be a host of younger activists

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