Nader: Influence for Good or Ill? Part II: Kuttner rebuts Chait’s review.
Dear Jon,
We invited you to review for the Prospect Justin Martin’s recent biography of Ralph Nader and Nader’s own memoir of the 2000 campaign. We didn’t learn much about these books from your diatribe, but we did learn a lot about what Jon Chait thinks of Nader: His campaign appearances in 2000, you wrote, were “larded with dissembling, prevarication and demagoguery . . .” (compared to Bush? Gore? ) His disillusion with Democrats reflects “ideological absolutism,” “egotism,” and “stratospheric self-regard,” rather than a principled challenge to a party lurching to the right. And, most astonishingly, you write that the ideological mobilization of organized business in the 1970s and 1980s occurred “largely in response to Nader and his movement.” In other worse, the dominance of corporate power in American politics in our own era which so appalls Nader is actually Nader’s own fault.
Much of your screed is directed against Nader’s apparent tipping of the election to George W. Bush, perhaps willfully on his part. This act, you write, cancels out Nader’s previous good works, though you are loath to credit even these. Long before General Motors set private detectives to find dirt on him, you write, Nader was already “paranoid” anyway. So the fact that “the conspiracy theorist [Nader] happened upon a conspiracy” (GM’s skullduggery) was actually a “great joke” in your view. And his leadership of the consumer movement was no big deal in any event: “If not for Nader, somebody else would have put seat belts in cars.”
What a pity that your rage blinded you to a more complex and useful appraisal of Nader and of the decay of the Democratic Party. As I noted in my Comment in the most recent issue of the Prospect, one has to have some appreciation of how the Democratic Party has collapsed over the past thee decades in order to appreciate Nader’s final act of frustration and lese majeste in 2000. As a number of commentators have observed in the pages of the Prospect, The New York Times and elsewhere, the Democrats might be leading a debate about Bush’s incipient war on Iraq; or they might be ducking the Iraq question the better to offer a real challenge to Bush’s views on the economy. But they are doing neither. As the estimable Frank Rich recently wrote, “The dirty little secret is that the Democrats have no more of an economic plan than they had an Iraq plan.”
In more than four decades of liberal social activism, most of it constructive and effective, Nader ordinarily made close alliances with liberal Democrats. Until the lurch of the Democratic Party to starboard, Nader’s efforts resulted in literally dozens of pieces of pro-consumer legislation. The Nader-inspired activist groups affiliated with Public Citizen also do heroic work keeping corporate lobbyists from taking over regulatory agencies. In some areas, such as the FDA, Public Citizen’s Health Research Group is literally the only countervailing organization providing alternative information and pressure. All these efforts are entirely absent from your account.
In the one sentence of your piece that is a kind of backhanded compliment, you acknowledge that “There was a brief period when a character such as Nader was able to produce an astonishing array of political triumphs.” But why did that period end? Your absurd answer, with a glibness worthy of the dissembling that you attribute to Nader, is that Nader’s own achievements “did galvanize a massive reaction from business . . .” and, anyway, Nader’s “paranoia and irrationality, contempt for nuance and savaging of allies were there all along.”
This is just uninformed nonsense. I will return to the 2000 election in a moment. Let me first disclose my own connections and qualifications. I have known Ralph Nader since the late 1960s. I have been a close observer of how Nader operates, both in my roles as journalist and as Senate investigator. I worked with Nader groups on reform legislation, and found them masterful. I briefly worked with Nader personally in 1975, in a post-Watergate coalition with other civic groups and the House Democratic Study Group that resulted in a reform of the House rules requiring for the first time that House committee chairmen be elected instead of appointed based on seniority. That was a revolutionary change, a real victory for procedural democracy and it would not have happened without Nader. My late wife was co-author of one of the early Nader books, on the turning away from community mental health efforts, which in turn set the stage for the epidemic of homelessness. I know nobody more dedicated to the public good.
Before the Democratic party turned to the right, Nader worked hand in glove with dozens of Democratic legislators and staffs, and even a few Republican ones. What you have simply missed in your glib rage is that Nader’s convictions and goals have not changed in 40 years; what has changed is that the Democratic Party has all but ceased to be a viable instrument of them.
To blame this evolution on Nader himself is just delusional. Why did organized business become resurgent beginning in the late 1970s? I addressed this subject at length in a book, and Nader got about four paragraphs. As you surely know, Vietnam divided the Democrats; Watergate led to a revulsion against government. Organized business, after a generation of post-Depression disgrace, roared back as a political force. Corporate money became more powerful in both parties. The stagflation of the late 1970s discredited liberal Keynesian economics. Business redoubled its ideological investment. Labor became relatively weaker as a countervailing force. Neo-liberalism gave many Democrats a nice ideology of deregulation with which to attract business support. Even in the 1970s, Nader was already working to counteract these trends; he did not cause them. As any reading of postwar history will reveal, organized business hardly needed Ralph Nader as a goad to seek to roll back progressive taxation, trade unionism and the regulatory constraints of the New Deal-Great Society era. But as business became more powerful and its Republican allies more ultra-conservative, the Democratic Party was dragged to the right.
It has been a good 20 years since most Democratic legislators have been strong allies of Nader and of progressive politics. Al Gore was just the wretched personification of a feckless and spineless Democratic Party.
This brings me to your discussion of the 2000 election. Like you, I would have preferred that Nader not run. Early in the election year, I did a long, skeptical interview with Nader which ran in the Prospect. I did not vote for him. I worried that he might tip the election to Bush. I did not find much to like in the Greens. Moreover, the strucParty? None of these needed Ralph Nader. John Judis is too shrewd an analyst to accord Nader more than an incidental role.
I was sorry that Nader ran in 2000, but the problem in that election was not Nader, it was Gore. No matter how you slice it and no matter how much you blame Nader, Gore was just a dreadful candidate.
You can’t seriously contend that there has beeture of the American Constitution makes it immensely difficult for third parties to succeed. (If Nader had run in the Democratic primaries, that would have been interesting.) Nader’s own motivation was not entirely clear. At times, it seemed that he was trying to push Gore in a more progressive direction. At other times, it seemed that he wanted to punish the Democrats. But Nader kept saying that the election was Gore’s to lose, and on that point Nader was surely right.
You claim that the evidence is unambiguous that Nader, with 2.74 percent of the popular vote, threw the election to Bush. You point to the time Gore had to spend in liberal states, the 97,488 votes Nader took in Florida, and the fact that Nader kept disparaging the distinction between the two parties, which you say helped Bush to blur his differences with the Democrats.
But, Jon, you overlook something that should be obvious: If Nader had not run, the 2000 campaign would have been an entirely different race. Gore might have been even more bland, boring and sloganeering; even more inconstant in his views, themes and tactics. The party base might have been even less energized. With or without Nader taking less than three percent of the vote, a vigorous Democrat would have blown Bush away. Yes, Gore won more votes than Bush; but given Bush’s weakness and the peace and prosperity of the times, Gore should have won going away.
The real subject worthy of your keen intellect is why the Democratic Party continues to decay and what we might do about it. That should be the source of your rage. It’s misleading and self-defeating to make Ralph Nader the scapegoat for the Democrats’ deepening erosion. He is, at worst, a symptom; you have foolishly mistaken him for the cause.
Nader: Influence for Good or Ill? Part III: Chait’s rejoinder
Dear Bob,
In stating that the Prospect invited me to review Nader’s book, you’re too kind. I actually invited myself, and I intended all along to use my review for a broader discussion of Nader. I don’t believe the editors I worked with had any different impression.
I didn’t “blame” Nader for the right-wing business backlash of the 1970s. I pointed out (as an aside) that Nader discounts President Bush’s depredations by predicting they will lead to a progressive counter-mobilization. If we accept this calculation, I wrote, it is only fair that we discount Nader’s triumphs by the conservative counter-mobilization he did incite. You argue that “any reading of postwar history” will refute the notion that Nader inadvertently goaded 1970s conservatism. In fact, my New Republic colleague and Prospect contributor John Judis writes in “The Paradox of American Democracy” that much of business’s political activity was actually public-minded, rather than narrowly interested. His book discusses this shift, and cites Nader as one of the causes. You may disagree with Judis’ reading of postwar history, but surely you must concede that it is a reading of postwar history.
You paint Nader’s candidacy as a reaction against the Democratic Party’s rightward shift. But as I argue, and as Martin’s biography makes very clear, Nader’s attack on the Democrats has much more to do with him than with them. Martin describes how Nader would suddenly turn against his allies in Congress and their legislation for no apparent reason. He was making “Tweedledee and Tweedledum” indictments of Carter and Reagan more than 20 years ago. Nader’s behavior, not to mention his own words, suggest that this results as much from his own psychology as from any real changes in the Democratic Party.
Yes, I mention Nader’s accomplishments only in passing. Your book, “Everything for Sale,” devoted less attention to capitalism’s merits than to its flaws. When you want to challenge the conventional wisdom, you can’t spend half your space repeating arguments everybody already knows. (And yes, I think it’s funny that a paranoid conspiracy theorist happened to become the object of a conspiracy. Don’t you?)
Thrice you accuse me of “rage.” I do enjoy excoriating dishonest and venal politicians, of whom Nader is merely the latest. If you think that such excoriation can only result from rage, then you must think I spend all my working hours in a state of rage. Although you were on book leave during much of my year at TAP, surely you saw enough of me to know that I’m a fairly calm guy.
In fact, I think it’s your ideological disillusionment with the Democrats that’s causing you to take up some shaky arguments. You cite Frank Rich as saying the Democrats have no plans for Iraq or the economy. Actually, many of them do, but because “the Democrats” consist of many politically and ideologically competing Congressmen, as opposed to a single administration, the party does not have a unified plan. You also, with Nader, state that Gore should have easily won the election. (Ironically, the Democratic Leadership Council you both so detest agrees.) I think the cultural backlash against Clinton counterbalanced the political benefit of the strong economy. That’s why Bush was leading Gore by 20 points in early 1999 — before any campaigning took place — and why Gore’s pollsters, who wanted to win, didn’t allow Clinton to campaign with their man.
Nonetheless, these are side disputes. My central contention is that Nader is systematically dishonest, and especially so on the topic of his helping to elect Bush. I further argue that his helping to elect Bush is not a side issue but one of essential importance in evaluating not only Nader’s campaign but his entire career. In response to this you reply only that Nader may have forced Gore to run a more interesting (and, you seem to imply, effective) campaign. First, I don’t think that’s true. Gore’s “populist” theme was largely a way of stressing issue areas where Gore had the more popular stance and allowing Gore to attack Bush rather than defend Clinton. Nader was probably a small part of the calculus. Second, to the extent that Nader forced Gore thematically to run further to the left than he would have in a two-candidate race, I don’t see why that necessarily helped Gore — Bush’s attacks on Gore as a big-spending liberal late in the race seemed to have some effect. Finally, all this is pure speculation, and it can’t count for very much against the hard facts of time, money and votes drained away by Nader. I think that you have left my central thesis standing, and, given your fondness for Nader, that is quite damning of him.
Jon Chait
Dear Jon,
Well, readers can judge who has the stronger case.
It’s just nuts to blame Nader for “inciting” the political ascendancy of big business as a resurgent political force. Have you heard of, say, the Heritage Foundation, American Enterprise Institute, the National Association of Manufacturers, the Federalist Society, et al? How about the Republicann no big-business undertow on American politics and on the Democratic Party since 1980. Nader was criticizing Democratic conservatism 20 years ago, but at least there was far more of a countervailing Democratic liberalism back then and Nader worked closely with Democratic liberals. Jimmy Carter was a far better ex-president than a president. It was Carter, prior to Clinton, who started the attacks on government in the name of Democrats, and Carter who distanced himself from the labor movement. A lot of people, including many who write for the Prospect, criticized Carter’s drift to the right at the time.
The most bizarre thing about your thesis is the claim that Nader was a bad actor all along. As proof of this, you cite the fact that GM put a private eye on his tail and tried to destroy him. In your eyes, this confirms Nader’s paranoia. This strikes me as a new low in blaming the victim, and if you find it laughable then you have an original sense of humor.
Yes, you’re a very sweet guy — and a smart one when you take on economic issues, but the palpable political rage in your piece was just misplaced.
Bob
