Leighton's Blog - Archived Entry

Last week, Ralph Nader named as running mate for his independent presidential ticket Peter Camejo, former Green Party candidate for governor in the California recall election. Nader’s choice of a running mate with a national reputation (political relevance was Camejo’s dividend from sharing the stage with the “serious” contenders in the California election) was meant as a signal to the Kerry campaign that in spite of the earnest hopes of Democrats across the country, Nader's run for office is not merely a ruse to broker a deal to nail a few vaguely greenish planks to the Democratic platform. For the third time in as many elections, it appears that Nader intends to stick it out to the final hour.

Nader’s much-maligned mantra in the 2000 presidential race was that the Democrats and the Republicans were virtually indistinguishable. Big business controlled both; each could be counted upon in almost equal measure to sell out labor, the environment and public health to a free trade agenda.

The Bush administration has rendered any such facile comparison untenable. Even Nader now acknowledges the breadth of the chasm that has come to divide the two parties since Bush’s inauguration. The Republicans’ quasi-fascist pivot under Bush’s leadership is invariably cited by those progressive-minded Americans who disparage Nader’s decision to run this time around as the sword of Damocles whose peril dwarfs the significance of any philosophical objection to the two-party system, no matter how legitimate.

But there is another, and perhaps better reason to reject the specious arguments Nader has offered in support of his candidacy: since the last election, the Democratic Party has changed at least as much as the Republican Party.

In 2000, when Nader galvanized the Left with his indictment of the Democratic Party’s betrayal of both its founding principles and its most steadfast traditional supporters, he was responding to the quite deliberate transformation of the party by President Clinton and his kingmakers at the Democratic Leadership Council. In the early nineties, in the United States as in Britain, the Left had spent the last twelve or so years vainly inveighing against the hegemony of conservative orthodoxy in national government. In the U.S., save for the brief and failed interlude of a single, one-term Democratic administration whose domestic economic policies largely followed a Republican deregulatory agenda, the Republicans had controlled the White House since before the end of the Vietnam War. Neither the old, social democratic, New Deal-type Democratic platform, nor the newer multicultural/feminist Great Society vision seemed capable any longer of doing much more than rallying party activists and intellectuals. They certainly were not winning national elections.

The Democratic Leadership Council offered a solution to the Democratic quandary. By jettisoning its commitment to the value of material egalitarianism and co-opting the Republican vision of a free market Utopia, the DLC, effectively in control of the Democratic National Committee, reinvented the party as the sympathetic alternative to the only game in town – free market capitalism with softer edges. The ploy worked: for the first time since the seventies, a Democrat was elected president, and then, for the first time since the sixties, a Democrat was re-elected president.

The success of the DLC’s tactic vindicated its vision of a “New” Democratic Party. There is a difference, however, between tactic and strategy, and while the party’s centrist feint was a brilliant exemplar of the former, the true believers of the DLC thought themselves to be in possession of the latter. The New Democrats saw in Bill Clinton the future of the Democratic Party, while in fact, the “Third Way,” as the Brits call it, was just a marketing tool, whose eight-year lifespan was only sustained for that long by the star-quality charisma of its leader. At least for the Democrats, it could not last; as a Marxist might observe, its "internal contradictions" were bound eventually to unravel the whole ball of yarn. The fantastic optimism of neoliberalism is predicated upon the non-existence of social classes in American society. That kind of denial is sustainable only for a party that represents the dominant class: while you can tell a roomful of capitalist oligarchs that there’s no such thing as “working people,” only entrepreneurs and their “team leaders” and "associates," and get a roomful of nodding heads, the same song falls flat on its face in a roomful of janitors, parking lot attendants and welfare recipients. The Republicans can celebrate the wonders of the free market into perpetuity. The Democrats cannot. Pretty soon, those at the receiving end of the instruments of "market discipline" are going to get tired of being told by their own party that the market has spoken, and it has deemed them unworthy.

In 2000, Nader was the only national figure ready and willing to stump for those who objected to the DLC’s narrow and cynical conception of the party’s future, and though he ran under the banner of the Green Party, his campaign was fueled primarily by the disaffection of a sizable swath of Democratic voters. The surprising breadth and vitality of the movement he rallied around him testified much more to the divisiveness of the New Democrats’ vision than to the power of Nader’s persona or the strength of his organization.

The groundswell of resistance to the DLC’s hegemony within the party only grew over the next three and a half years under the Bush administration, as the Democratic “opposition” in Congress played a role entirely unworthy of the name. Then, as much to the candidate’s surprise as to everyone else’s, Howard Dean found himself taking over for Nader as this year’s vehicle for the insurgency within the party ranks. Dean’s campaign slogan, “Take Back America,” was – probably consciously – a call to arms against not only the Bush administration, but against the New Democrats. If not for the need to maintain a modicum of party unity, the candidate of “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party” (a phrase unabashedly ripped-off from the late Senator Wellstone) might as well have dispensed with the euphemism and called on his supporters to “Take Back Your Party.”

Of course, the Deaniacs did not succeed in taking back their party, as Iowa caucus-goers selected the very un-rebellious John Kerry as their choice for the Democratic presidential candidate. The unspoken condition, however, of the rest of the party base’s agreement to forget about Dean and go along with Iowa’s decision was that Kerry refrain from following the counsel of the DLC. For its part, the DLC had already effectively suffered a vote of no confidence, as it became increasingly clear that its candidate, Joe Lieberman, was to be refused even the honor of being considered viable by both the voters and the party apparatus itself, the disapproval of the latter most notably demonstrated by the person of former running mate (and former DLC hope) Al Gore. Kerry emerged as a compromise candidate between the faction supporting Dean and the faction sympathetic to the rhetoric of the New Democrats. To build and maintain a united front in the general election, the party needed a leader either so broadly inspirational or so blandly uncontroversial as to transcend or else to fly under the radar of the fissures in the party base. We got the latter.

Ralph Nader refuses, perhaps willfully, to recognize that the energy behind his 2000 campaign had little to do with third parties per se, and far more to do with the struggle over the fate of one of the two behemoths he disparaged as one and the same monster. For the time being, that struggle is resolved. In his fruitless search for new turncoats to form a support base for his pointless candidacy, Nader now wanders aimlessly in the lingering smoke that will eventually clear for him, as it has for everyone else, to reveal an empty battlefield whose fight has already been waged. The spurn he suffered at the Green Party convention and his acceptance of the Reform Party endorsement are testaments to the complete absence of support from those who championed his cause in the last election, and the sad desperation of an insurgent in search of an insurgency. Four years ago, Nader campaigned on the widespread opposition to the ideological proximity of the two parties. His supporters in the last election took his message to heart, and went on to reclaim the Democratic Party from those who would turn it into a watered down version of the Republican Party. He assisted substantially in that worthwhile purpose. Now his egoistic blindness threatens to derail its success.