This is intended just to bring together some thoughts from these two threads, and not to add more fuel to the fire. I agree with LP and gmack that these arguments no longer have much of a point; I’m not going to become any less angry, and anyone who hasn’t been convinced thus far of Nader’s perfidy isn’t going to change his or her mind now. Thus, barring some surprising development, I hope that this will be the last time that I ever blog about St. Ralph.
Part of the anger that Scott, myself, and so many others feel has to do with Nader specifically, rather than with what happened in 2000. I think that I would have more sympathy for the pro-Nader position, even in its apologetic form, if he had been a genuine leftist running for progressive purposes in 2000. To take an alternative scenario, consider if a Green Party candidate who had been interested in the environment, who had taken the third party-building aspect of the run seriously, who had been solid on gender politics, and who had demonstrated a personal preference for authoritarianism had run a campaign that had concentrated on safe blue states instead of battleground states, yet the outcome had been the same. In this scenario, our Nader stand-in takes, say, 10000 votes in Florida instead of 90000, after making clear to his/her constituents in the Sunshine State that they should have been voting for Gore. I’d still be angry, because such a candidacy would have remained utterly at odds with the structure of American elections and still would have been casually dismissive of the danger of George W. Bush. Yet, I suspect that my animus towards candidate X and his/her supporters would be less; at least they would have been pushing a progressive/left position, someone who might plausibly be mistaken for Eugene Debs, instead of the faux-populist, faux-progressive Nader. It’s the transparency of Nader’s schtick that gets me riled, almost as much as the consequences of his candidacy.
I also think there’s a difference between 1996 and 2000. Although in retrospect I think it was wrong to vote for Nader in 1996 (it ended up simply feeding his vanity, and setting the stage for 2000), it wasn’t evident at the time that a symbolic third candidate vote would be destructive. Clinton was coasting to an easy win, and indeed the polls showed a larger gap even than the considerable victory that Clinton won. In that context, an “ok, but” vote was entirely reasonable. In 2000 it wasn’t, even in Massachusetts or California. The effort to build to 5% and make the Green Party nationally viable (as unserious as Ralph was about that project), would have been devastating for progressive, leftist politics in the United States, wholly apart from the direct and immediate consequence of bringing an incompetent reactionary to power.
Finally, I don’t understand why anyone takes the “but maybe Gore would have gone to war, too” argument seriously. Yeah, Lieberman is an uber-hawk and all, but he would have been replacing Dick Cheney, and it’s impossible for a sensible person to argue that Lieberman would have had more influence over Gore than Cheney had over Bush. The rest of the administration, from Secretary of Defense on down, would have been filled with people less hawkish that those that made up the Bush administration. Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Feith, et al would have been on the outside looking in, and in every case their replacement would have been less enamored of the war. Those voices on the outside might still have lobbied hard for invading Iraq, but without an administration that was committed to the invasion and also committed to trumping up intelligence in order to build support for the invasion, such a campaign would have had considerably less force. It’s also important to remember that the Bush team bears, through negligence, some considerable responsibility for allowing September 11. Without a changeover between parties, without a shift from an administration that took terrorism seriously to won that couldn’t care less about it, and without the replacement of committed professionals by inept boobs, September 11 might not have happened. No 9/11, no Iraq War. Most importantly, Gore’s personal opposition to the war should weigh very, very heavily against the argument that he would, nevertheless, have taken the country into Iraq. Gore opposed the war before it was cool, and in contravention of all the established norms for how defeated presidential candidates should behave. I know that Naderites seem to have a problem with this concept, but the personal political preferences of the President of the United States really do have an impact on policy. So, given that the Gore administration would have been less hawkish in composition and would have been led by a man strongly in opposition to the invasion, I’d say that the “but Gore would have invaded Iraq, too” argument has some impressively high hurdles to leap before it should be taken seriously.
That is all.
