The Nader Myth
The sore winner writing of the centrist Democrats continues, and in that spirit reliable asshole Johnathan Chait has a piece in New York Magazine retelling once again the liberals’ favorite faerie tale, the story of how the Goblin Ralph Nader brought on the dark times of George W. Bush by leading gullible voters astray. It is a faerie tale in the old sense, meant to caution youngsters to listen to their elders and not wander into the dark woods.
It’s total horseshit of course.
The causes of the 2000 election loss are many. First and foremost was turnout. The decisive voter was the one who stayed home. The 2000 election had, by a good margin the lowest turnout of any open presidential race in modern history. Clinton had pitched an image of the Democrats as strictly centrist, ending welfare as we knew it, closing the era of big government, deregulating business, fighting aggressive but small wars around the globe, and proud of bipartisan accomplishments achieved by working closely with the right. Gore was a boring monotone technocrat who did little to distance himself from his predecessor. Bush struck much the same tone, he was a uniter and not a divider, a compassionate conservative.
Go back and watch some humor from the 2000 election. There’s only one joke, that the candidates are identical. An episode of Futurama from that year showed an election in the year 3000 where the opposing candidates were literal clones of each other. Voters who did not read detailed policy papers were given little other than personality to vote on. And Bush, much to the horror of academic elites, had a more genial and likable personality. When Democrats attacked Bush, they found little to go after in his proposed policy, they attacked his diction, qualifications, and intelligence.
The question is not so much what went wrong in Florida, but what went wrong everywhere else. Why was the legacy candidate coming from a (by all accounts) successful administration and from the party demographically favored in national elections doing so poorly against a tongue tied redneck that the election came down to mere hundreds of votes in a single state?
Chait’s telling of the faerie tale is typical of the genre in that it refuses to admit any culpability on the part of Democrats for losing an election. This is an area where I have to give Republicans credit over the Democrats. When they lose an election, they get mad about it, they question their leadership and demand change within the party. Sure, the change they want is insane, but they at least avoid the insanity of doing the same thing more than once and expecting different results.
Gore ran a weak race. He failed to make a convincing case for his agenda. He failed to connect with voters outside of the Democrats’ base. He was a dull lecturer prattling on about lock boxes and he wouldn’t discover how to make a good emotional case for his climate agenda until several years later. Gore lost the race because Gore lost.
But the Democrats expect the voters to make up for their failings. They want obedience from the public, not input. If you aren’t happy with us, vote for us anyway. We’d be better if it weren’t for those dastardly Republicans, just trust us. Keep voting no matter how far afield of the animating vision of social welfare that drove the party from the 30s through the 60s we drift. We’ll fix this behind closed doors.
Nader is not hated because he swung an election. Nader is hated for the reason that Sanders is hated: because he offers a vision of politics that is solidly to the left of the Democrats. It’s not a threat to their electability, it’s a threat to a their legitimacy.
The Democrats stand for three things: neoliberal reform in international trade, a gradualist and defensive approach to civil liberties, and not being Republicans. They try not to advertise the first stance because it is wildly unpopular with their progressive base. They try to make the second stance seem more bold than it is, as if waiting to support marriage equality until the polls looked safe (Obama’s “evolving position”) were somehow brave. It is the third position, opposition to Republicans, that they base their appeal to voters on. They’re not the bad guys.
If the Republicans didn’t exist, the Democrats would have to invent them. There is no way to make their dull, technical, capitalistic and small-c conservative policies look inspiring to regular people without some monster to contrast them to. The Republicans bolster their power. There was no time when it felt more daring to just sport a blue “D” than in the depths of the Bush years. I bet a lot of them quietly miss those days. Being a progressive just meant liking Jon Stewart.
Chuck Klosterman wrote a cute little thing a while back called “The Importance of Being Hated” where he outlined the difference between a Nemesis and an Archenemy. It’s Klosterman, so it’s zippy and very Generation X, but it has a decent idea at its core.
Here is the short answer: You kind of like your nemesis, despite the fact that you despise him. If your nemesis invited you out for cocktails, you would accept the offer. If he died, you would attend his funeral and — privately — you might shed a tear over his passing. But you would never have drinks with your archenemy, unless you were attempting to spike his gin with hemlock. If you were to perish, your archenemy would dance on your grave, and then he’d burn down your house. You hate your archenemy so much that you try to keep your hatred secret, because you don’t want your archenemy to have the satisfaction of being hated.
The Republicans are the Democrats’ Nemesis. They hate them, and the hate is genuine, but in the end, they’ll sit and laugh together at the Correspondents’ Dinner, interview on each others’ talk shows, and say nice things when pushed. Nobody is so loved by the Democrats as the Republican who will cross the isle on just a single issue. John McCain and Orrin Hatch used to receive regular praise from the centrist liberal media. Any Republican willing to denounce Trump now receives the same. They’re bastards but deep down we kind of love those rapscallions.
The left is the Arch-Enemy of the Democrats. The left hits them where it hurts. The left offers a vision of a politics where they are squeezed and reveal their true face: a status quo party that believes in not rocking the boat and an orderly handover of power to capital. A real, powerful left would be able to tell the public that the Democrats have long abandoned the progressive vision of Roosevelt, Kennedy, and Johnson. That they are no less in love with war and big business than the Republicans. They sold out the unions two generations ago. That what they have called gradual progress has been a negotiated surrender of working class interests.
Ten times as many registered Democrats voted for Bush as for Nader in Florida in 2000. There was no self examination of how that bleeding could be stopped. I looked. I couldn’t find a single article addressing the reasons blue voters went red. But the Democrats don’t care too much. The Republicans are their favorite sparring partners. “Best of Enemies” and all that.
The left are a true threat to the boring centrism that has completely failed working America. And so Nader must remain always the bogeyman, the sinister liar who lead the children into the wolf’s den at the dawn of our grim political era. It’s a lie, and if you start pulling at it, the careful defensive positioning of the Democratic party begins to unravel. There is a whole world of political possibility to their left, and they work harder to keep you away from it than they do at anything else.
