August 30, 2004
Ralph Nader Sucks... And Always Has
By Andrew Dobbs
http://www.burntorangereport.com/archives/2004/08/ralph_nader_suc.html
Byron wrote a great post on Ralph Nader's recent dalliance with none other than the KKK. I know its fun to think of a guy who is supported by not only unbathed, wooly faced anthropology majors in hemp pants and Che Guevara T-shirts but also white supremacists with a surprising lack of teeth so good job, Byron. But one line in the post kinda irked me, the last one:
He did too much good for America prior to 2000 than to have his entire career be defined by his recalcitrance in hopeless crusades for president in 2000, and 2004 that only serve to dampen his otherwise exceptional career.
This is a frequent, and mistaken assumption- that Ralph Nader was cool but turned bad in 2000. Jonathan Chait wrote a powerful article for the New Republic in February of this year (article only available with paid subscription or on Lexis-Nexis) detailing the myth of a "good Nader." Here are some choice excerpts:
The good-man-who-went-wrong assessment of Nader is virtually unchallenged among liberals. But, if you think about it for a moment, it's awfully strange. Heroes of history do not normally reverse themselves out of the blue. George Washington did not end his days pining for a return of the British monarchy to U.S. shores. George Orwell did not suddenly warm to the virtues of totalitarianism. Nor, for that matter, did Ralph Nader go wrong after decades of doing good. The qualities that liberals have observed in him of late--the monomania, the vindictiveness, the rage against pragmatic liberalism--have been present all along. Indeed, an un-blinkered look at Nader's public life shows that his presidential campaigns represent not a betrayal of his earlier career but its apotheosis.
Nader made his name with the 1965 publication of Unsafe at Any Speed, an expose of the Chevy Corvair... Few realize that Nader's campaign against the Corvair was only the most visible edge of an uncompromising, conspiratorial worldview. Nader believed not only that the Corvair was dangerous but that General Motors (GM) knew it was... Nader hounded liberal Connecticut Senator Abraham Ribicoff into investigating whether GM had lied about what it knew in testimony before Congress.... Nader insisted he had an array of inside sources and documents that would reveal this conspiracy. Ribicoff dutifully assigned a pair of staffers to the case, and they spent two years chasing down Nader's leads. None of them panned out. The investigators found no evidence that GM knew of the Corvair's safety flaws. The failure to confirm Nader's suspicions enraged him. "He could not let go of the Corvair issue," one of the staffers told Martin. "He was fixated. And, if you didn't accept or believe the same things he did, you were either stupid or venal." (...)
In fact, even then his work was driven by ideologically motivated fanaticism. In 1971, Nader pressured one of his associates, Lowell Dodge, to sex up his study "Small on Safety: The Designed-in Dangers of the Volkswagen."... Nader insisted that Dodge rewrite the conclusion of the study so that it began, "The Volkswagen is the most hazardous car in use in significant numbers in the U.S. today." Objecting that "the conclusion is not reflected in the data," Dodge left the project, allowing others to take credit as principal authors. "I have always carried around considerable guilt about what I regard as the extreme intellectual dishonesty of that conclusion," he told Sanford. (...)
Nader's friends recalled that often he would act furtively, speaking in code, always convinced he was being monitored or phone-tapped. When he insisted in 1966 that he was being followed, one of his friends replied, according to Martin, "Ralph, your paranoia has grown to new extremes." Of course, it turned out that in that instance Nader was being followed. But this merely proved the old adage that sometimes even the paranoid have enemies plotting against them.
Nader sued GM and won $425,000, which he used to found activist organizations that helped push through a staggering series of consumer and environmental reforms, most of them in the late '60s and early '70s. Nader rightly wins credit for spurring progress during the era. And yet, even during his heyday, Nader habitually denounced liberals and their work, sabotaging the very causes he claimed to believe in... In 1970, Nader championed a report by his staff savaging Ed Muskie, the liberal senator from Maine. Muskie, who helped engineer the Air Quality Act of 1967, had a reputation as an environmental ally, but Nader's report called the act "disastrous," adding, "That fact alone would warrant his being stripped of his title as `Mr. Pollution Control.'"
That same year, the Senate overwhelmingly passed a bill to create a Consumer Protection Agency (CPA), what Nader called his highest legislative goal. But, just days after praising the bill, Nader turned against it, saying that "intolerable erosions" had rendered the bill "unacceptable."... Without Nader's backing, the bill lost momentum... and died in committee. The pattern repeated itself, as the CPA passed either the House or the Senate five more times over the next six years, but Nader rejected every bill as too compromised. "Ralph could have had a consumer agency bill in any of three Congresses," liberal consumer activist and former Nader associate Mike Pertschuk told Martin. "But he held out" (...)
The final defeat came in 1978... He maligned Washington Representative Tom Foley as "a broker for agribusiness"-- despite the fact that Foley had bucked agribusiness to pass a bill regulating meatpackers. He attacked... Pat Schroeder, who had supported earlier versions of the CPA but had minor reservations this time, as a "mushy liberal" selling her vote to corporate contributors. He so alienated Democrats that, as the measure went down to defeat, one reportedly said as he voted no, "This one's for you, Ralph." House Speaker Tip O'Neill told The Washington Post, "I know of about eight guys who would have voted for us if it were not for Nader."
For Nader, it was almost axiomatic that anybody who disagreed with him was a corporate lackey. "Nader sees critics as enemies," wrote Sanford, a former ally. "Those who do not serve him serve the evil elements of corporations." This Manichaean worldview came through in everything Nader did. In the 1970s, he worked to establish automatic funding for Public Interest Research Groups (pirg) on campus--proto-Naderite outfits to train the next generation of like-minded activists. Nader's preferred funding mechanism was for every student to automatically contribute $1; those who objected could go to the college administration for a refund. But the administration at Penn State University in 1975 opted instead for a positive checkoff, whereby each student would check a box if he wanted to pitch in $2 for the pirg. Nader attacked Penn State as "a citadel of fascism" and threatened one Penn State board member (...)
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." (...)
In his 2002 memoir, Crashing the Party, Nader alleges that Bill Clinton leaked the Gennifer Flowers adultery revelations himself to avoid having to address Nader's agenda. "I'm almost certain that
and his supporters knew was coming," he posits. "Clinton knew how to stay on message, and nothing was going to get him to take a stand on President Bush's nafta proposal before Congress, or on nuclear power, or on the failing banks in New Hampshire." This assertion neatly encapsulates Nader's style of thinking--the fevered conspiracy-mongering, the moral righteousness, and the laughably outsized role he assigns himself in world events. (...)
As Nader embarks upon his fourth protest run against the Democrats in as many elections, there is something slightly ridiculous about the shock of his liberal critics. They still don't know who they're dealing with. Nader is not a heroic figure tragically overcome by his own flaws; he is a selfish, destructive maniac who, for a brief historical period, happened upon a useful role. (...)
Like other liberals, the people behind the website seem to think, if they could only persuade Nader that his candidacy might help reelect Bush, it would dissuade him from running. More likely, it would have the opposite effect. The real mystery is not why Nader would do something so destructive to liberalism. It's why anybody ever thought he wouldn't.
Sorry for the long excerpt but the article has a lot of good information. Essentially, Ralph Nader is a megalomaniacal egocentric psycho who sees his own reputation as far more important than the progressive reforms he claims to support. Yeah, he has passed some important bills, but even Mussolini made the trains run on time. Ralph Nader is nothing more than a very sad man with a very paranoid and cynical vision of the world who is sees himself as something far more important than he really is.
Ralph Nader claims he is building a progressive movement for the future. But where's the beef? Very few progressives are lining up behind him this year and it is the far Right that is doing more to promote his candidacy than anybody. He claims that the two parties are morally bankrupt, but is a movement built on cynicism writ so large that help from even the KKK is acceptable any more morally solvent? I would argue no- his movement is about him and not his ideals.
Independent and third party movements are not all bad- in fact they can be very good for our Democracy when the movement is about ideas and not any single individual. But for better or for worse because of the party system these movements typically form around an individual and die off when that person leaves the political arena- George Wallace, John B. Anderson and Ross Perot are a few examples. Ralph Nader goes a step lower than them even by now completely jettisoning his (deceptively) good reputation in order to up his honoraria in the next four years. Shame on Ralph Nader and let us not forget that this recent destructiveness isn't in spite of his previous work, it is the character of it.
Posted by Andrew Dobbs at August 30, 2004 03:34 PM
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