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Showing Original Post only (View all)Ralph Nader wants liberals to back Rand Paul. Don't do it. [View all]
By Bill Scher
This week, Ralph Nader returned to the political stage with a new book Unstoppable, whose triumphant subtitle is The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State. To kick off his publicity tour, he has argued that liberals should "definitely" impeach President Barack Obama, abandon the "international militarist" Hillary Clinton, and instead embrace Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) as a possible leader of his dream coalition.
To what end? In the book, Nader writes that by marrying the left with the libertarian right, we can cut off government support for corporations and have "honest government," "fair taxation," and "more opportunity." Nader sees relatively low-hanging fruit in opposing "sovereignty-shredding global trade agreements, Wall Street bailouts, the overweening expansion of Federal Reserve power, and the serious intrusions of the USA PATRIOT Act against freedom and privacy." He also articulates loftier, if not fully fleshed out, aspirations to "push for environmentalism," "reform health care," and "control more of the commons that we already own."
Some liberal commentators like Esquire's Charles Pierce and the American Prospect's Scott Lemieux are dismissing Nader's vision as fantastical, since the right will never join his progressive crusade. But Nader's vision should not be dismissed so quickly. He leads his book with concrete examples in the 1980s of when he put left-right coalitions together to stop an over-budget nuclear reactor project, and to pass legislation to protect whistleblowers who have uncovered wasteful government fraud.
However, coalition building requires compromise and, most critically, prioritizing one set of issues over another. The trade-offs inherent in Nader's path into Rand Paul's arms should make liberals run screaming.
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http://theweek.com/article/index/260813/ralph-nader-wants-liberals-to-back-rand-paul-dont-do-it