The Folly of Ralph Nader [View all]

[ehrnst]

In the 2000 election, the high priest of anti-consumerism turned politics into the very thing he hated most.

Oct. 13, 2000, 15,000 zealous progressives packed Madison Square Garden for one of Ralph Nader’s super rallies. They paid $20 each for admission, evidence of their passion, since political rallies are almost always free. That year, many on the left were disappointed with the Democratic nominee for president. Al Gore was a wonky centrist and a stilted speaker who appeared to possess few core principles. For progressives, his association with Bill Clinton, icon of triangulation and political compromise, counted against him. At a time when the left was outraged over our corrupt campaign finance system, Gore was dogged by questions about money he’d received from sketchy donors with ties to foreign governments.

At best, Gore offered progressives a continuation of politics as usual. True, the Republican in the race seemed a right-wing buffoon, but Nader told his followers to vote their hopes, not their fears, and his message about citizens banding together to overturn entrenched, amoral corporate interests spoke to many people’s deepest aspirations. Bush and Gore, he said at Madison Square Garden, are “both for cracking down on street crime but ignoring corporate crime, which takes far more lives.” In response, the crowd erupted in chants of “Let Ralph debate!” Young people flocked to Nader, and hip musicians played his rallies: The lineup in New York included Eddie Vedder, Patti Smith, and Ani DiFranco, whose ’90s cool had not yet evanesced.

Nader concluded his almost hourlong speech by calling the evening “the most memorable political rally of the year 2000.” Some who were there felt they were witnessing the flowering of an epochal social movement. “The protest movement that has been growing on a grassroots level, as evidenced by the World Trade Organization demonstrations in Seattle, reached its political coming-of-age last night,” the Village Voice wrote.

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In retrospect, the paradox of the Nader campaign is that the high priest of anti-consumerism turned voting into an act of individual self-affirmation, a kind of lifestyle choice. He addressed voters the way companies address consumers—as atomized individuals whose personal experience is paramount. “Welcome to the politics of joy and justice!” he roared at the Garden. Despite the zero-sum structure of American presidential elections, he told voters they needn’t settle for one of two dispiriting mass-market options built of innumerable compromises, or worry about the broader effects of their vote. This was bespoke politics.

Nader’s movement never constituted a real cross section of the left; even sympathetic observers noted that it was overwhelmingly white. After attending another of Nader’s massive rallies in Chicago, Salim Muwakkil wrote in the Chicago Tribune, “This lack of racial diversity among Nader supporters is particularly striking, given the 66-year-old candidate’s progressive positions on economic democracy and social justice.” Yet plenty of people on the left saw Nader as the era’s great political hope. “Nader and the Green Party represent the best opportunity in half a century to place a progressive agenda on the national scene,” wrote Juan Gonzalez in the left-wing magazine In These Times. He added: “It has brought hundreds of thousands of white youth into electoral politics in much the same way that Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition movement brought disaffected blacks to the voting booth in the ’80s.”

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_next_20/2016/09/ralph_nader_and_the_tragedy_of_voter_as_consumer_politics.html

(Please excuse if this has been posted before - I could not find it in the search)