Nader's Triumph

I think (could be wrong) Ezra said it first, but listening to the rhetoric of major Democratic thinkers, I can't help but think that Ralph Nader was right, after all: Electing Bush was the best way to get the Democratic Party to take the left seriously. Latest example comes from Thomas Frank, writing behind the New York Times' firewall:

What we have watched unfold for a few decades, I have argued, is a broad reversion to 19th-century political form, with free-market economics understood as the state of nature, plutocracy as the default social condition, and, enthroned as the nations necessary vice, an institutionalized corruption surpassing anything we have seen for 80 years. All that is missing is a return to the gold standard and a war to Christianize the Philippines.

Historically, liberalism was a fighting response to precisely these conditions. Look through the foundational texts of American liberalism and you can find everything you need to derail the conservative juggernaut. But dont expect liberal leaders in Washington to use those things. They are New Democrats now, enlightened and entrepreneurial and barely able to get out of bed in the morning, let alone muster the strength to deliver some Rooseveltian stemwinder against economic royalists.

Mounting a campaign against plutocracy makes as much sense to the typical Washington liberal as would circulating a petition against gravity. What our modernized liberal leaders offer - that is, when theyre not gushing about the glory of it all at Davos - is not confrontation but a kind of therapy for those flattened by the free-market hurricane: they counsel us to accept the inevitability of the situation and to try to understand how we might retrain or re-educate ourselves so we will fit in better next time.

"Mounting a campaign against plutocracy makes as much sense to the typical Washington liberal as would circulating a petition against gravity." Remember, when Gore (too-late in his campaign) began running against entrenced corporate interests, the Press mocked him and said it was just another sign of his dishonesty.

They mocked Gore's dishonesty. In 2006, there's something perverse and disturbing about that.

Of course, Nader wasn't actually right. Electing a Republican president may have moved the rhetoric of the Democratic thinkers to the left, but there's precious little evidence of it actually shifting the positions of Democratic politicians to the left. (See Clinton, Bill or Hillary.) Moreover, the fundamental assault Nader brought against Gore was the wholly-fictional charge that "there was no difference" between Gore and Bush, or the GOP and Dems in general.

Maybe Nader can't be blamed for not forseeing 9/11, and the illegal war that Bush would launch that Gore would not have. But foreseeing 9/11 was unnecessary. The PNAC crew made it clear - as early as 1998, for those who were listening - that they didn't care what precipitated it, but America needed to go to war against Iraq and the President (whoever that was) should take advantage of whatever crisis was available. Given that one of the PNAC-ers in chief (one Richard Cheney) had, if I recall correctly, a minor role in Bush's campaign, that alone should have made any Nader voters rethink their support.

Sadly, it didn't.

Oh, and Frank is absolutely right. Maybe - just maybe - electing a pile of new (not New) Democrats to their respective houses will help tilt the balance in favour of more populist politicians. Even if it doesn't, subpoena power is a fun toy, and Dems should enjoy using it.