A striking feature of American politics is the long-standing ineffectiveness of the Left. If we ask ourselves how the American Left differs from a successful left-wing party like the SPD (as discussed in At the Kroll Opera House), one obvious difference is the American Left’s unwillingness to form a coalition with Centrist forces. For example, the debate over universal healthcare never “gets to yes,” largely because the Left insists on “single-payer” healthcare as the only path to universal coverage. This leads them into absurd situations; for example, I used to get mailers from Bernie Sanders touting “Medicare for All – Single Payer” as an alternative to Obamacare. First of all, Medicare is an excellent program, but it is not single-payer; there are co-pays, and you have to pay for Medigap insurance. Second, the majority of people who got coverage under Obamacare got it through the Medicaid expansion, and Medicaid is practically single-payer.
So, Medicare is not single-payer and Obamacare is largely single-payer, but Bernie said it’s the other way around, so end of discussion.
Will Bernie Sanders support Biden’s efforts to add a subsidized public option to Obamacare? Sanders can be reasonable at times, so we’ll see. It might finally dawn on him that there are many roads to universal coverage.
How did we end up with a situation where the Left refuses on principle any coalition with the Center? This is diametrically opposed to what the SPD did, where the key to their parliamentary success was communication with and influence over centrist parties on many issues. This isn’t a rhetorical question; it is instead key to understanding our historical situation. And I can answer this question, but first I must tell you a story about Texas, in the old days.
In 1972 I voted in a campus election, and one proposal was to fund the “Texas Public Interest Research Group,” or TexPIRG, designed to do consumer and environmental research within Texas to inform both the public and the state government. I pictured them doing research—for example—on safety issues in drilling for oil. I voted for the proposal ($1 per semester per student, tacked onto our tuition bills), and so did most of my peers.
In 1972, most students at that university lived on $200 per month or less, and many lived on less that $150. Minimum wage was $1.60 per hour, and many university employees made $6000 or less.
There were about 35,000 students paying $2 per year, and a $70,000 research budget was substantial. The Student Union provided TexPIRG a free office, and they could have hired a full-time office manager for probably $5000 a year, and ten full-time researchers for $6000 each, with $5000 left over for office equipment and other expenses. (Of course some of the researchers could have been part-time). They probably could have used the university’s copy center for reports.
I regularly visited their office because I wanted one of those research jobs. The visits were always the same: there was a piece of notebook paper with “TexPIRG,” handwritten on it, taped on the inside of a small window in the door. The office itself was absolutely bare. There were no desks, no chairs, no people. The door was locked.
The fee stayed on my tuition bill for several semesters thereafter. The student union reclaimed the office after the first semester or two of inactivity—but not before the notebook paper turned slightly yellow and curled a bit; no one had ever turned on the AC in the office.
I lived a long time in Texas after 1972, and was active politically, and I never saw the slightest trace of TexPIRG. If they did any research, which I doubt, it never influenced Texas policy debates. If you search online, there’s supposedly still a TexPIRG organization, and maybe they do useful work; we live in hope.
The PIRG movement was a brainchild of Ralph Nader, who exemplifies Leftist intransigence and hostility toward the Center. In 2000 he compared Bush and Gore to “Tweedledum and Tweedledee.” This might sound like the usual thing a third-party candidate might say—-George Wallace used to say that there “wasn’t a dime’s worth of difference” between the two major parties—but let’s drill a bit deeper here: was it true?
If Al Gore had taken office in 2001, what would the Earth’s climate be like today? Would we have invaded Iraq? Who would sit on the Supreme Court? Other examples might be added, but clearly when Nader said there was no difference between Bush and Gore, he was wildly incorrect.
The 2000 election was immensely influential in right-wing thinking, because it demonstrated that a Republican presidential candidate could take office and rule with almost absolute power without winning the popular vote, passing one tax cut after another with no effective opposition. This seemed like a miracle of grace to many adherents of Billionaire Capitalism—-their greatest fear being an awakened democracy. If, as Cheney said, “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter,” then Bush proved that democracy doesn’t matter, either.
Although there were other factors in Bush’s victory, the most important was Nader’s candidacy.
During the campaign, Nader launched harsh attacks against Gore, most notably misrepresenting Gore’s environmental record, and he did not conceal his preference for Bush:
Nader often openly expressed his hope for Bush’s victory over Gore, saying it “would mobilize us”,[52] and that environmental and consumer regulatory agencies would fare better under Bush than Gore.[53] When asked which of the two he’d vote for if forced, Nader answered “Bush … If you want the parties to diverge from one another, have Bush win.”[54] As to whether he would feel regret if he caused Gore’s defeat, Nader replied “I would not—not at all. I’d rather have a provocateur than an anesthetizer in the White House.”[55] On another occasion, Nader answered this question with: “No, not at all … There may be a cold shower for four years that would help the Democratic Party … It doesn’t matter who is in the White House.”[53]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Nader#2000
Nader is not only an excellent example of Leftist hostility to the Center, he practically invented the attitude, and this raises a couple of important questions:
How did Nader become the leader of the Left, and why did he take such an oppositional stance against the Democrats, a Left-Center party which had implemented so many of his ideas in the Sixties and Seventies?
The first question may be puzzling to my younger readers—wasn’t Nader always an important figure on the Left? And the answer is no, Nader was never a Leftist, and by that I mean he never demonstrated against the Vietnam War, never marched against segregation with Dr King or even worked much with the early environmental movement, despite mutual concerns.
Nader’s thing in the ‘60s was consumer safety, and he did not want to branch out; he did not want to get wild; he did not want to get funky. The Sixties and Seventies passed him by, and he was glad to see them go. He was not part of that scene at all.
Nader became a Leftish presence through his tireless speaking tours during the Reagan administration, when the Left was at low ebb. He went to college campuses, talked about the evils of corporate power and the absolute necessity of a third party (led by himself) and collected a check for each and every speech. Eventually he not only became a leader, he re-shaped the American Left.
This was a catastrophe not just for the Left, but for America. Because Nader never had a full-fledged political philosophy; he noticed that corporate influence tended to corrupt government and his remedies for that were standard liberal measures: legislation backed up by new government agencies. But Nader himself was not a liberal—he was never a Democrat and as a young man he was a libertarian.
Worse, he never analyzed capitalism itself. He was concerned with a broad range of issues, mostly related to public health and safety, and he never saw that the common thread in all these issues was capitalism. He might have said the underlying cause was “corporate greed” or “corporate corruption,” but beyond these catchphrases there was no analysis; he never connected the dots.
In 1981 the long struggle against Billionaire Capitalism began, but there was no intellectual framework for the Left to understand what was happening. Marxism had never emphasized the mutability of capitalism, and it had failed to capture the moment during the Sixties and early Seventies. Marxist dogma could not describe any form of oppression that wasn’t economic, so the entire cultural struggle against Cold War socialization—materialism, the denial of nature, the loss of the life of the spirit, sexual repression—-was simply invisible to Marxist eyes. Imagine a revolutionary ideology that was completely unable to sense a critical revolutionary moment: that was Marxism in the ‘60s.
Marxism did however have a critique of capitalism, which was a start. But it had become Soviet dogma, and wasn’t fit for use in an American environment. But Marxism did demonstrate that Left movements need an analysis of capitalism, a vital point.
But in 1981 there was no one to make that point, no one to develop that analysis. Granted, there is an implicit critique of capitalism in American liberalism, but this critique was seldom made explicit. Liberals of that era didn’t want to mention capitalism as a system, for fear of sounding like Marxists, and so they were rolled over by Billionaire Capitalism.
The ‘80s were a dark time for American Leftists. The country made a hard right, with destructive consequences for unions, the environment, civil rights enforcement, and government accountability. The Left naturally felt it had the answers to Reagan’s mistakes and excesses…..but no one was listening. There was no Left media, no leaders of any stature, and not even a common ideology.
Enter Ralph Nader. He had been a national figure for a long time, and was widely respected for his product safety work. Every time you put on a seat belt, you might have been reminded of him. He was a rare public figure who changed everyday life for the better.
And he wasn’t a Marxist, or even a liberal. Even Leftists saw that as an advantage. And it was possible to regard his lack of ideology as pragmatism.
And Nader was a good organizer, and he kept showing up.
That explains how he became a leader of the Left; the next question is, how or why did he develop such an oppositional attitude toward the Democrats, the Center-Left party in America?
Of course I will not stoop to psychoanalysis here, but I do believe that his lack of ideology played a role. In the end, what was the fundamental difference between Nader and Mondale, or Jesse Jackson or Michael Dukakis? If you strip away Nader’s aura of specialness, there wasn’t much to choose from in terms of ideology—they were all liberals. There might be differences of emphasis, but no one was suggesting changes in capitalism itself.
In fact, when Mondale said that one of Japan’s competitive advantages over America was that Japanese CEOs were more innovative, he went further than Nader, because Mondale was questioning whether the ultra-rich were earning their privileges, a veiled attack on the class system itself.
Nader had to differentiate himself, in other words; he obviously couldn’t let Fritz Mondale outflank him on the left. So Nader used what was at hand: his reputation for frugality and incorruptibility. He positioned himself as morally superior to mere liberals, especially those who had held public office.
There was of course no nuance in this position, and it didn’t take long for this branding exercise to degenerate into a Manichaean battle between Good and Evil.
What Nader needed was a way of differentiating himself on the issues, or ideologically, with a clear critique of capitalism, for example. But instead he used an assertion of moral superiority in place of something substantive. He used image instead of content.
Having achieved a position of leadership on the Left, and likewise having differentiated himself from leading Democratic figures, how did Nader use his power and influence?
First, there’s a long and unedifying history of Nader maximizing cash flow in his organizations; Nader worked on that a lot. I won’t go into detail, because charging $20 per head to attend his campaign rallies speaks for itself.
Second, Nader ran for president often. He was first mentioned as a possible candidate in 1972, but he didn’t actually run until a generation later, in 1996.
In 1992, of course, Ross Perot got 19% of the vote. Many Republicans believed that Perot threw the election to Bill Clinton, and although that’s debatable—-when Perot temporarily withdrew, the majority of his supporters switched to Clinton. But Perot’s candidacy did influence the Electoral vote; Clinton carried a number of states that Bush would have otherwise been expected to win.
Did Perot’s performance in 1992 influence Nader to run in 1996? Did Nader see himself throwing an election to the Republicans, as Perot was perceived as doing in 1992?
In the 2000 election, Nader clearly intended for Bush to win, as evidenced by his own statements; the excuses made for Nader are just different flavors of denial. Nader didn’t expect to win, and he was on record as favoring Bush over Gore—it’s as simple as that. Nader was acting as an auxiliary to the Republicans—that is, to Billionaire Capitalism.
But if you somehow believe that what happened in 2000 was an aberration, a case of a good man making a bad decision, then look at what happened in 2004. The 2000 election had been a catastrophe for the Greens, and they wanted no more to do with Nader. So in 2004 Nader was faced with the necessity of petitioning to get on the ballot in most states. The Democrats responded by challenging many of his petitions, either in court or administratively. And in several cases the Democrats prevailed. In Pennsylvania, for example, the courts found that 62% of the signatures on Nader’s petitions were invalid—they were “rife with forgeries,” as the judges put it. Really.
How did Nader respond to this? He appealed to the US Supreme Court, which refused to hear his case. He didn’t fire anyone in his campaign, he didn’t launch an investigation or apologize—nothing.
Let’s quickly review the rationale for Nader’s candidacy. We start with his assertion that the American political system was deeply corrupt, and that only an individual of exceptional purity and integrity could make the needed changes. And this individual therefore forged thousands of petition signatures on his path to glory. Sounds like the end of the line for Nader’s movement, doesn’t it? And his vote total did decline by 84% from 2000 to 2004.
And yet Nader remains inexplicably influential. Sanders’ campaign in 2016 lacked any real critique of capitalism, other than the catchphrase “casino capitalism,” just as Nader used “corporate welfare” instead of actually making sense on the subject.
Sanders’ campaign was likewise built on Nader’s template of self-righteousness and extreme opposition to the center. The talk of a “rigged” election, of betrayal and fraud by the DNC, only laid the groundwork for later catastrophes, including January 6.
The threat to tip the election to Trump was front and center, frequently repeated by Sanders’ supporters and surrogates. Given what happened in 2000, there was real teeth in that threat. And there’s data to suggest that that might indeed have happened:
In the end, of course, Sanders did support Clinton, perhaps a bit half-heartedly, but he was much more reasonable than Nader would have been in his place.
But the 2016 primary election didn’t have to play out as it did. There was another path, one laid out by Howard Dean in 2004. In Dean’s campaign, opposition to Republican policies was much more pronounced; Sanders hardly talked about the Republicans at all. And there was never any question that Dean would support the eventual nominee, and Dean’s supporters never threatened to sit out the election or support Bush—or Nader.
In the end, Dean had established enough credibility to become DNC chairman, where he led the Democrats to a striking victory in the 2006 Congressional elections. Without that election, and without Dean, Obamacare would never have passed in 2009.
There is a natural symbiotic relationship between the Left and the Center that Nader and his followers always ignored. Early in Sanders’ 2016 campaign he mostly talked about the issues, and Hillary Clinton was forced to follow suit. Sanders made Clinton a better candidate, and the Democratic Party a better party.
But when Sanders’ campaign lost its vision, so did the Democratic Party. Clinton debated well against Trump, but she had no way to counter Trump’s connection with the sour mood of the country; she fell back on “America is already great!” which definitely missed the moment. She needed the combative but idealistic Sanders—we all did—and she didn’t have him. She needed a sharply defined program of reform, and Sanders’ credibility behind it.
And if Sanders had been the SDP or Howard Dean, she might have had that.
Let’s pivot to what we can do. What would an effective left-wing movement look like in 21st century America? Here are some points:
- We must always focus on the good of the people. Nader was willing to sacrifice the people in 2000 to teach the Democrats a lesson, to give them “a cold shower.” And some of Sanders’ supporters took the same attitude in 2016. This is simply unacceptable; this is how fascists or Stalinists think.
- Liberals and centrists must always be regarded as potential allies and recruits. And we should cautiously extend that to conservatives as well. We need to deal with our opponents with firmness and fairness. The world and time are vast, and enemies may yet turn to friends.
- Moral superiority is irrelevant, in fact it is often just a con. The only relevant moral political choice is whether we are willing to sacrifice to build a better world. Once that choice is made, reasonable people may well differ on the means to that end.
- As a substitute for content-free moral superiority, we should be perfectly clear about basic values: human life is sacred; human life comes from nature, therefore nature too is sacred; “man does not live by bread alone,” that is, the life of the spirit is profoundly important; the values of the Enlightenment are the basis of our civilization.
- And with capitalism, we need to make the case that capitalist socialization, while valuable economically, is profoundly destructive where there are no checks and balances to its power.
- We stand for free and fair elections, and an end to disinformation and intimidation in our political life.
- We need to be clear that we aren’t running for student council, as so many liberals seem to be. We are here to change the world, come what may.
The Socialist Investor 