Hedges bets on Nader?

Posted by Jan Frel at 11:19 AM on February 27, 2007.

"But when Nader hinted in San Francisco that he might run if Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton became the Democratic Party nominee, I knew I would be working for his campaign if he indeed entered the race." -- Chris Hedges.

Ralph Nader isn't the answer. Ralph Nader is a relic from the last political era in Washington where meaningful regulatory reform was possible -- Nixon+Gerald Ford. Those days are long gone. You can't have DC-based corporate reform anymore. Forget it.

If you were curious about the discrepancy between 80% of Americans hating corporations and Ralph Nader's >1%-2.7% showing in presidential races, you might conclude that there was something that most Americans didn't like about the way Nader said he was going to solve the problem, which was more or less that he would pull on the levers in Washington and regulate our way out of the corporate state. You'd expect Nader to at least consider it, but I don't think he has.

What Nader doesn't get is that while corporate power is high on our hate lists, so is the idea that anything good is going to come out of Washington.

It's important to remember, and I'm sure most readers do, that Nader wasn't always a presidential candidate -- he was a public advocate who rode a wave of citizen write-in letters into Washington in the '70s and was responsible for the creation of regulatory bodies like the EPA, the establishment of stringent auto-manufacturing safety rules, and the like. It was a very impressive career, if centralized government made safe by regulation is your kind of thing. But Nader found himself eventually squeaked out of the process. I've written a bit on Nader's political approach before,

Ever wonder why, after a Babe Ruth-like career as an advocate, Nader decided to run for political office? Because DC stopped working the way he understood it to. Increasingly his lobbying, his ideas, his staff weren't relevant. Not only was he quoted less and invited to fewer hearings, but his quotes mattered less and the same went for hearing testimony -- even as the call-ins and write-ins kept piling in. Fast forward the years of irrelevance, and we come to his great act of desperation: running for the presidency. Unfortunately his political vocabulary and mind were too entrenched in tinkering reform language. And so were his followers.

And so Nader didn't see the bigger problem -- that our political system is totally obsolete and unaccountable: hundreds of years obsolete, unaccountable for decades.

Let's take Nader and his political solutions to the present era. His grand acheivement, the EPA, has been turned right around on its head. Bush and the business state have come right in, pillaged and looted the thing to work in their favor. So it's a "captive" agency, captive to the entities it's supposed to regulate. And since the EPA has federal control of environmental regulation, at the expense of state and local governments, it's a tool that corporations are using to prevent local efforts from happening.

If I had helped spawn a regulatory disaster like this I'd do at least three things:

1. Fess up to everyone who would listen that environmental regulation or any regulation through centralized government is a dangerous thing because it leaves it open to takeover by hostile interests -- you only need one takeover.

2. Fess up that further attempts to save society using the techniques I had used to create the EPA were perhaps the wrong way to go.

3. Fess up that there's something odd about the enormous discrepancy between the public appetite for corporate reform and the public appetite for my sales pitch to deal with it.

Then I might stand up and say to my band of followers, "Hey, let's not do it like this. My political imagination is sharply limited by my experience from decades ago. I don't know what we should do, but let's certainly not approach politics like I have because it obviously does not work. ..."

What's worse, a national politician like Hillary who barely feels the need to conceal her disaster politics, or a marginal one with disaster politics who stands up and speaks to the disaffected, telling them they know the way out? It's the marginal one, because they've got nothing to lose and they know they are losers.

So Chris, I'm writing this to you, but also to anyone else who is looking for a way to deal with their political discontent: just because there is a massive crisis in national affairs, that the Democratic presidential candidates aren't saying the right things, and the only apparent standing presidential alternative at this point is Ralph Nader, it doesn't mean that you have to place your hopes in him, or the presidential campaign itself as a road to redemption.

For starts, consider as an instant disqualification that Ralph Nader has no critique of the presidency itself. Nader will stand up and tell you that it would make democratic sense for him to sit in the Oval Office and work on behalf of 300 million citizens. I think it's an outdated and very dangerous 18th century platform, virtually unmodified from the day of its inception.

Imagine an 18th century dentist telling you with a straight face he'd take care of your root canal, proudly brandishing his crude pliers as the answer. You'd laugh out loud, or run screaming. I recommend you extend that sensibility to anyone who comes up and tells you they'll solve all your problems from the White House.

Part of the instinct to believe in the presidency is that it's easier to think about one candidate instead of our enormous political crisis, nevermind that this one candidate will have to deal with it alone if you give them that power. Another part is that it's our political culture to believe that the presidential campaign vehicle is an appropriate place to deposit our political energy.

It's a very strong pull.

I myself was drawn to go work on Howard Dean's campaign in Vermont for these two reasons. Nader himself made a pilgrimage to Dean's HQ in Vermont in 2003, begging for the vice presidential slot when Dean was flying high.

But I can tell you with the authority of personal experience that the road to the White House paved with pure bullshit.

From my perspective, the only viable presidential candidates at this point are ones who have a critique of the powers they would inherit at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., and of our virtually unmodified 18th century government as a whole. They would need to fess up to the impossibility of governing the federal instrument with 435 House reps and 100 senators for 300 million, 9 Supreme Court justices for 300 million, one president for 300 million.

They would feel embarrassed and disgusted to see people talk about them so slavishly, they would reject the idea of being a vessel for macro issues like global warming, Iraq, or corporate power, and they would most certainly tell their supporters that they should spend their political energy on building a democratic movement.

And they should certainly use their own past political experience as an example of why our federal instrument is failing. In the case of someone like John Edwards, it's not just that he made a mistake in voting for the war, it's that the federal government was hijacked by a few thousand people from 300 million; that if the Republic were functioning, we would have never gone to war, that creeps like him should never have had that power. In the case of Nader, it's that the regulating bodies he helped build a few decades ago have been hijacked and are working against what they were intended to protect.

Tagged as: politics, elections, 2008, ralph nader

Jan Frel is AlterNet's senior editor.