The Knock on Nader

Hearing that Ralph Nader is running for president for the fourth time, I keep thinking about the unusual and never-to-be- repeated circumstances in which I first met him. In early 1994, the Young Democrats at my college, Wesleyan University, brought Nader to campus to speak about how to revive our democracy. As he approached the podium, the chair of the local Young Democrats tried to pin a Democratic Party button on his lapel.

Even then, before Nader was marked by the Democratic establishment as a heretic, Nader had no love for the Democrats or any other party. He deftly deflected the Young Democrat's advance and refused the pin. Nader explained, as he reached the podium, that he was staunchly independent of all parties. He was a citizen, he told the audience, not a party operative.

At the reception afterward, I gave him the biggest compliment I had in my limited college freshman vocabulary: "Why don't you run for president?" I asked. "Politicians are like leaves on a tree," he told me disapprovingly. "The health of the tree isn't in its leaves, but in its roots." Engaged citizens, he added, are the real leaders in our society.

I DIDN'T KNOW when I asked the question that Nader had already run for president, as a write-in candidate in the 1992 New Hampshire primary. And, of course, I had no idea that he would run for president three more times, as a Green in 1996 and 2000 and as an independent this year. In 2000, as a local Green Party organizer, I saw how Nader's disdain for party politics undermined him and the Green Party. Today, his antipathy has compelled him to run for president again—against the wishes of all who would say that our allegiance must be to parties over issues, to strategy over ideals.

It's a bid that is likely to generate more vitriol against Nader in the next few months than he ever received from corporate America in his 40-plus years of activism. When people are claiming that the future of our nation and the planet are at stake in this year's election, Nader has come unwanted upon the scene to declare that, no matter who wins, our democracy will still be broken, our world will still be divided between haves and have-nots, and our environment will still be in a state of crisis that few Democrats or Republicans have the courage to substantively address.

As usual, Nader's analysis is spot on. Bush isn't the enemy. He's the public face of a corrupt system at its very worst, a system that has snared most Democrats as well.

But Nader didn't need to run for office to raise this. He could have run a media campaign without seeking ballot access. After bowing out of the election, Howard Dean called Nader and suggested an alliance that could reform the Democratic Party. But Nader has chosen his own path. Why?

The Nader haters and the Nader lovers focus on whether the man is a self-absorbed demagogue or selfless saint. But we should consider his ideas, not just his character.

"This isn't just our fight," Nader recently said about his 2004 campaign. "This is a fight for all third parties. . . . I don't think America belongs just to the Democratic and Republican parties." This is virtually the same message Nader campaigned on in the previous elections.

It's noble rhetoric, if badly timed. But if Nader is trying to build a real independent electoral movement to revitalize American democracy, his presidential bid will be a dismal failure. As in 2000, his contempt for political parties will mobilize his supporters into the same dead end that progressives have been stuck in since the Reagan Revolution.

TO UNDERSTAND why Nader is not a movement builder, it's worth recalling what happened to the Seattle Green Party when it tried to support him in 2000.

The local Green Party, which grew out of Nader's 1996 campaign, was once a hotbed of smart, young environmentalists who quickly worked their way into important nonpartisan coalitions with City Hall. Their influence wasn't huge, but it was notable. They led successful campaigns to preserve Seattle's watersheds, coordinated volunteers and donated money for progressive City Council candidates, and lobbied on a number of issues, from transportation policy to stopping corporate welfare.

It was in this context that a group of local activists banded together in late 1999 to form a Seattle-based, statewide committee to support Nader. This campaign was supposed to initiate local Green activists in partisan politics. But the effort was in vain. Nader's national organization told them, remarkably, that they formed too early, that Nader wasn't prepared to work with them. They weren't allowed to use Nader's name, and they dissolved unhappily.

In the meantime, supporters of the Natural Law Party tried a hostile takeover of the Seattle Greens to get it to endorse their New Age wacko candidate for president, John Hagelin. A Trotskyite group calling itself Socialist Alternative started its own Nader campaign, outside the Greens, as a means of promoting themselves. Months went by with grassroots enthusiasm for Nader spinning its wheels in senseless bickering, ineffective speculation, and uncoordinated activism.