Friday, March 05, 2004
How do you see Ralph Nader? As a noble idealist? There's not many left who hold that view. As a self-righteous blowhard? Join the club. But wait, there's a third category of views about Nader: that he's a lifelong liberal who has fallen into self-destructive spasms in his declining years.
Jonathan Chait's profile of Nader's career - Make You Ralph - serves as a powerful refutation of the notion that Nader's fits of egomania, self-righteousness, and paranoia are a recent phenomenon. Chait chronicles the paranoid and liberal-hating side of Nader and shows how far back it goes in his life.
By Chait's account, Nader savaged Edmund Muskie - one of the Senate's early voices for environmental protection - and consistently worked to defeat bills to create a consumer protection agency. People who criticized him could only be personal enemies in his feverish mind.
A new and invidious wrinkle in Nader's thinking emerged by 1980:
It's funny because he said the same thing during the 2000 election. Of course the 1980 election ushered in an era of strong conservatism, deeply unbalanced budgets, and a rightward shift in the electorate. The Democratic Party rode to defeat when it ran liberals in 1984 and 1988, only succeeding with the center-left Clinton, whose own efforts were further hampered by the consolidation of right wing power in 1994. Nothing from this early flirtation with Leninist notions of "heightening the contradictions" should have told Ralph that electing another conservative Republican in 2000 would produce a boost in liberal activism, and a consideration of the outcome of 12 years of Republican rule might have caused a less hard-hearted person to wonder if the cost was worth it. What liberal coalitions exist now are not so much geared toward expanding civil, consumer or environmental protections as shielding those that remain from further onslaught.
Of course, one of the time-honored definitions of insanity is the notion that you can try the same thing repeatedly and get different results. In that sense, Ralph has very much left this world.
Jonathan Chait's profile of Nader's career - Make You Ralph - serves as a powerful refutation of the notion that Nader's fits of egomania, self-righteousness, and paranoia are a recent phenomenon. Chait chronicles the paranoid and liberal-hating side of Nader and shows how far back it goes in his life.
By Chait's account, Nader savaged Edmund Muskie - one of the Senate's early voices for environmental protection - and consistently worked to defeat bills to create a consumer protection agency. People who criticized him could only be personal enemies in his feverish mind.
A new and invidious wrinkle in Nader's thinking emerged by 1980:
In the summer of 1980, Jonathan Alter (now a Newsweek columnist) worked on Nader's voting guide for the presidential election. Alter came away amazed by Nader's fury at Carter. "He didn't seem overly distressed at the idea of Ronald Reagan becoming president," Alter later told Martin. As Nader addressed a gathering of supporters in 1981, according to The Washington Post, "Reagan is going to breed the biggest resurgence in nonpartisan citizen activism in history.
It's funny because he said the same thing during the 2000 election. Of course the 1980 election ushered in an era of strong conservatism, deeply unbalanced budgets, and a rightward shift in the electorate. The Democratic Party rode to defeat when it ran liberals in 1984 and 1988, only succeeding with the center-left Clinton, whose own efforts were further hampered by the consolidation of right wing power in 1994. Nothing from this early flirtation with Leninist notions of "heightening the contradictions" should have told Ralph that electing another conservative Republican in 2000 would produce a boost in liberal activism, and a consideration of the outcome of 12 years of Republican rule might have caused a less hard-hearted person to wonder if the cost was worth it. What liberal coalitions exist now are not so much geared toward expanding civil, consumer or environmental protections as shielding those that remain from further onslaught.
Of course, one of the time-honored definitions of insanity is the notion that you can try the same thing repeatedly and get different results. In that sense, Ralph has very much left this world.
