Ralph Nader and the Politics of Conscience
Ralph Nader
A few years before his death in 1968, Norman Thomas, the six-time candidate for president on the democratic Socialist ticket, spoke at Princeton University. After the lecture in which he looked back over a lifetime of advancing progressive, broadly humane politics, an undergraduate had a question: what did he consider his greatest political achievement?
Thomas answered: the Democrats adopting my agenda.
The student questioner was Ralph Nader. He was then in his early 20s, the son of an immigrant Lebanese restaurant owner in the northwest Connecticut village of Winsted. He was well along in developing the moral-based principles that would place him in the tradition of Norman Thomas: an ever vocal outsider whose ideas and ideals are first dismissed as unworkable, untimely or uncharted but then wend their way into the agendas of the formerly resistant.
In the summer of 1996, Nader was the Green Party presidential candidate on the ballot in California and more than 20 other states. He accepted the nomination at UCLA in August, delivering a nearly three hour speech without notes that was a blend of facts, scorn and inspiration. With vast supplies of each, Nader had two political assets that set him well apart from his major rivals, Bill Clinton and Bob Dole: he is consistent, he is taintless. He was the cleanest figure in public life, having what Ronnie Dugger of the Texas Observer called “the integrity of Thoreau and the conscience of St. Francis.”
Since the late 1960s, when he exposed General Motors’ officials and their disdain for building safe automobiles, Nader’s consistency has been in combating the might of unelected and unaccountable corporate power. “It’s gotten so you can tell Democrats from Republicans anymore in this country,” he told the Greens that August. “They’re both totally beholden to corporate America….Politics has been corrupted not just by money but by being trivialized out of addressing the great, enduring issue of who controls, who owns, who pays, who has a voice and access.” The Washington-based Nader, whose long record of service includes the founding or inspiring some 40 non-profits that include Public Citizen, the Health Research Group, the Center for Auto Safety, the Appleseed Foundation, the Center for the Study of Responsive Law and the Critical Mass Energy Project.
As with automobile companies that now herald themselves as champions of safety because air bags are standard equipment—after resisting the Nader-pushed idea for decades when thousands of lives were lost in highway crashes that might have been saved—others also have seen the light. Pat Buchanan, the Cadillac-driving populist steamed so much about corporate welfare and corporate abuse of worker when he ran for president in 1966 that he sounded like a Nader’s Raider.
The stone-throwers who have taken aim at Nader—The Wall Street Journal calls him “St. Ralph” and The Washington Times knocks him as “the national scold”—have perfect records: nothing but misses. Hordes of his critics would welcome the discovery of any flaw or failure that could discredit his character, and finally be done with him. It hasn’t happened yet, and would have by now.
Nader’s candidacies—he has run five times for the presidency—have been problematic for the American Left. As admirable as Ralph may be, as tireless as he worked for one cause after another and as much as he has personally mentored and rallied thousands of the idealists and lovers of the long shot, he can’t win: cheer for Ralph, thank Ralph but don’t vote for Ralph.
In the fugitive world of comfortable liberalism—tack to the center when tailwinds blow that way, steady the boat, don’t rock it—Nader’s allies on the Left were either shaking their heads in dismay or wagging their fingers in wrath in early 2004 when he announced that he was giving it another try for the White House. “Please be honest with yourself,” pleaded the editors of The Nation magazine when calling on him not to run, “this is the wrong year.” Without offering a date on when it might be the right year for Nader or for Libertarian, Socialist, Communist, Socialist, Natural Law or any other third party candidate, The Nation’s plea represents liberals in a state of forgetfulness. It wasn’t Nader who cause the defeat of Al Gore by George W. Bush in 2000. It was Gore’s own compromised campaign—beginning with the choice of the spineless Joseph Lieberman as his running mate—that, first, gave progressives no choice but to give 2.8 million votes to Nader and, second, was unable to win Gore’s home state of Tennessee or Bill Clinton’s Arkansas. Taking either state would have negated Bush’s electoral win in Florida. By repeating it to the point of a mantra—“Nader put Bush in the White House”—centrist Democrats who saw the corporate friendly and military supportive Clinton years as objects of pride, have bullied Nader supporters to denounce him as a spoiler, show-stealer and an egomaniac—that last pot-shot from Al Sharpton, no less.
Nader is problematic because he persists in trying to replace tactics-based politics with conscience-based politics. Accept the lesser of two evils, he is told, and forget about the victims of the lessened evil. Be tactical, be a middle-of-the-roader, just this one time, and forget presumably, that the middle of the road is where the head-on crashes are.
Had a genuine political differences existed between Gore Democrats and Bush Republicans in the 2000 election the public might have noticed and the nation would have been spared the Supreme Court giving the election to Bush by a 5-4 vote. The closeness of the popular vote—which Gore won by 500,000 votes—prompted William Daley, Gore’s campaign chairman, to say to a reporter after the election, “To tell you the truth, I think they [the voters] never really liked either of them.”
A much-favored argument in 2000 for Ralph to behave and calm down was that a Bush win almost assures more Antonin Scalias and Clarence Thomases on the Supreme Court. If that were a possibility, it was because Senate Democrats were part of the unanimous 98-0 vote that put Scalia on the court and 11 Democrats were part of the 52-48 vote for Thomas. Then there was the legacy argument. All the noble deeds of Ralph the Good Guy getting us safe cars, clean air and better-wired toasters will be forgotten because Ralph the Bad Guy wouldn’t be a team-man Democrat. If anything, Nader’s run in 2000 and 2004 should have been moments when it was seen that Nader has been right all along: he can’t join the team because it isn’t playing against another team. In “Crashing the Party,” Nader’s memoir of the 2000 race, he lists 20 major positions taken by the Clinton-Gore administration—from supporting a bloated military budget to backing dictatorships—that have been faithfully carried on by Bush-Cheney.
Nader is a team player. He’s captained for decades a team that would offer true political competition to the Democrat-Republican team that plays the same one-party game on the same field with much the same result. If American style democracy were only about the five times Nader ran or the six times that Norman Thomas did or the five Times Socialist Eugene Debs did, the cautions against supporting Third Party, or Fourth, Fifth, Sixth or Seventh Party candidacies might hold. Except that they are about planting seeds now to sow later.
By their contempt for the nation’s powerless and their panting for hard or soft money from corporate seducers, Republican and Democratic leaders—“the RepDem hybrid” in Nader’s phrase—are all but daring citizens to support third parties. Public regard for Washington politicians are at all-time lows. Is Nader’s assessment not accurate?: “The two major parties are already crumbling. They’ve lost the popular mandate, they can’t get half the vote in a presidential year. People want more competition. Republicans and Democrats are fossil parties with no mass-base and compete against each other with 30-second nonsensical TV ads.”
In 2010 Nader surprised both his supporters and critics by coming out with “Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!,” a 733-page novel that in well-crafted prose combines fact and fable. America’s boardrooms, hives of capitalism where money is the honey, are the last places you’d think an idea by Nader, the arch-skeptic of corporate power, would be taken to heart. The unlikely idea? Share your wealth, you wealthy ones. Published by Seven Stories Press, a New York house where works by Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn and others of progressive bent are marketed, the title is from an imagined scene following the September 2005 Hurricane Katrina calamity in New Orleans. Warren Buffett, the megabillionaire from Omaha had come with truckloads of food, water, tents, medicine and other basics for the homeless and hungry.
In the prologue, Nader describes the moment: “Coming upon a family of a dozen or so adults and children huddled around a crude campfire, Warren reassured them and consoled them. He took their hands, hugged their trembling children and looked into their eyes. The old-timers noticed that there were no reporters, no photographers, no television crews. A composed elderly grandmother cupped his hands in hers and cries out, ‘Only the super-rich can save us.’
What follows is Nader’s fictionalized vision of how Warren Buffett, months after New Orleans, persuaded 16 others of the well-heeled to give away large parts of their oceanic fortunes for the public good. In the summer of 2010 what Nader had called in his novel “a practical utopia,” became a reality. Buffett, along with Bill Gates, announced that more than three dozen billionaires—from old money philanthropists like David Rockefeller to nouveaus like Michael Bloomberg, Ted Turner and Ross Perot—had responded to their call to join The Giving Pledge. Buffett had communicated with as many as 80 potential givers. A sampling of the letters is on the Web site givingpledge.org.
As he put the squeeze on his fellow captains of commerce, what credentialized Warren Buffett was his own pledge of giving 99 percent of his monetary wealth—pegged at $40 billion, give or take a few depending on the Dow. Short of becoming a Franciscan mendicant, that’s about as close to taking a vow poverty any billionaire can get. Many pledgers who had been raking it in during their prime years have chose to devote their 60s and 70s to unstashing their cash to their favorite causes or nonprofits. In 1997 Ted Turner, who is as rich in ideas in preventing nuclear war and preserving the environment as he is in dollars, gave $1 billion to the United Nations Foundation. In 2008, Kenneth Langone, co-founder of Home Depot, gave $200 million to the New York University Medical Center, which followed large unrestricted donations to Bucknell University, the NYU business school and Roman Catholic Groups.
It’s likely that the divesting billionaires will continue to pay accountants, brokers, tax lawyers, financial advisers, secretaries, chauffeurs, Gulfstream pilots, cooks, caddies, and household help to rein them away from life’s ordinary irks. Good for them to be freed up, plus providing jobs for workers in their companies and the assorted cornermen. But the super-rich are still akin to thousandaires and hundredaires. No one gets a pass from meeting the daily moral challenges to live justly, to make probable what is possible, to decrease violence and increase peace. George Kaiser, the Tulsa, Oklahoma chairman of BOK Financial Corporation and whose family fled Nazi Germany in 1938, wrote to Buffett: “I suppose I arrived at my charitable commitment largely through guilt. I recognized early on that my good fortune was not due to superior personal character or initiative so much as it was dumb luck. I was blessed to be born in an advanced society with caring parents….As I looked around at those who did have these advantages, it became clear to me that I had a moral obligation to direct my resources to help right that balance.”
Another of the deep pocketed donors is Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle and previously known for giving Harvard $115 million and then, in protest of the school’s dismissal of Lawrence Summers as president, taking it back. In a letter to Giving Pledge, Ellison said that he decided years ago to divest 95 percent of his wealth: “Until now, I have done this giving quietly—because I have long believed that charitable giving is a personal and private matter So why am I going public now? Warren Buffett personally asked me to write this letter because he said I would be ‘setting an example’ and ‘influencing others’ to give. I hope he’s right.”
The generosity of the wealthy is admirable, but as Ralph Nader, whether as the nation’s town crier or the conscience of Washington, has said too many times to count, a difference exists between charity and justice. Money to charity eases the problem; money to justice destroys it. Charity money intervenes after the problem grows. Justice money goes to preventing growth.
Among the latest to agree is Peter Buffett, one of Warren’s three children. In a New York Times op-ed on July 7, 2013, he echoes Nader: “Money should be spent trying out concepts that shatter current structures and systems that have turned much of the world into one vast market….As long as most folks are patting themselves on the back for charitable acts, we’ve got a perpetual poverty machine. It’s an old story; we really need a new one.”
Midway in “Only the Rich Can Save Us,” George Soros, speaking to an audience of newspaper editor at their annual convention in Washington, said “that we live in a period of widespread poverty, insufficient affordable housing, low wages, hungry children, that tens of millions of American families are deeply in debt, that disparities of income and wealth in our nation are huge and steadily growing.
“’So why hasn’t the capitalist economy collapsed?’ you may wonder. Setting aside the fact that it did, during the Great Depression, the answer is simple. Because it is not a capitalist economy, with companies both large and small having an unfettered freedom to fail. Rather it is a predominantly corporate capitalist economy, with Washington DC serving a backstop function of bailing out, guaranteeing, subsidizing and overcontracting to big business. The astute restaurateur Nathra Nader once said, ‘Capitalism will always survive because socialism will always be there to save it.’ Corporate capitalism is in charge but it is inundating us with manufactured wants and whims instead of delivering the necessities and allowing public budgets to reflect the priorities of a sane and just society.”
Nader’s novel stands as truth-based fiction.