From: Grlygrl201@aol.com
Date: Wed Nov 01 2000 - 19:00:17 PPET
(there's just too much cool irresistable election stuff)
The hook:
<<If Nader's goal were actually progressive reform--a ban on soft
money, a higher minimum wage, health-care coverage for some of the
uninsured, a global warming treaty--it would be possible to say
that his strategy was breathtakingly stupid. But Nader's goal is
not progressive reform; it's a transformation in human
consciousness. His Green Party will not flourish under Democratic
presidents who lull the country into a sense of complacency by
making things moderately better. If it is to thrive, it needs
villainous, right-wing Republicans who will make things worse. Like
Pat Buchanan, Nader understands that his movement thrives on
misery. But the comparison is actually unfair to Buchanan (words I
never thought I'd write), because Buchanan doesn't work to create
more misery for the sake of making his movement grow the way Nader
does. From a strictly self-interested point of view, Nader's stance
is the more rational one.>>
in its entirety, it's fairly hilarious:
SLATE POLITICS: Wed., Nov. 1, 2000
--ballot box: Ralph the Leninist
By Jacob Weisberg
Over the past 10 days, liberals have been voicing shock and dismay
at the imminent prospect of their old hero, Ralph Nader,
intentionally throwing the election to George W. Bush. A first,
eloquent protest came 10 days ago from a group of a dozen former
"Nader's Raiders," who asserted that their former mentor had broken
a promise not to campaign in states where he could hurt Gore and
begged him to reconsider doing so. Others, including Newsweek
columnist Jonathan Alter have expressed a similar sense of
disappointment and betrayal.
Nader's response to all this heartfelt hand-wringing has been to
scoff and sneer. On Good Morning America, he referred
contemptuously to his old disciples as "frightened liberals." The
Green Party nominee is spending the final week of the campaign
stumping in Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Oregon, and
Washington--the very states where a strong showing stands to hurt
Gore the most. Nader has said he wants to maximize his vote in
every state in hopes of attaining the 5 percent of the vote that
will qualify the Green Party for $12 million in federal matching
funds in 2004. Speaking to foreign journalists in Washington
yesterday, he explicitly rejected Internet vote-swapping schemes
that could help him reach this qualifying threshold without the
side effect of electing Bush president. In various other TV
appearances, Nader has stated bluntly that he couldn't care less
who wins.
This depraved indifference to Republican rule has made Nader's old
liberal friends even more furious. A bunch of intellectuals
organized by Sean Wilentz and Todd Gitlin are circulating a much
nastier open letter, denouncing Nader's "wrecking-ball
campaign--one that betrays the very liberal and progressive values
it claims to uphold." But really, the question shouldn't be the one
liberals seem to be asking about why Nader is doing what he's
doing. The question should be why anyone is surprised. For some
time now, Nader has made it perfectly clear that his campaign isn't
about trying to pull the Democrats back to the left. Rather, his
strategy is the Leninist one of "heightening the contradictions."
It's not just that Nader is willing to take a chance of being
personally responsible for electing Bush. It's that he's actively
trying to elect Bush because he thinks that social conditions in
American need to get worse before they can better.
Nader often makes this "the worse, the better" point on the stump
in relation to Republicans and the environment. He says that
Reagan-era Interior Secretary James Watt was useful because he was
a "provocateur" for change, noting that Watt spurred a massive
boost in the Sierra Club's membership. More recently, Nader applied
the same logic to Bush himself. Here's the Los Angeles Times'
account of a speech Nader gave at Chapman University in Orange,
Calif., last week: "After lambasting Gore as part of a do-nothing
Clinton administration, Nader said, 'If it were a choice between a
provocateur and an anesthetizer, I'd rather have a provocateur. It
would mobilize us.' "
Lest this remark be considered an aberration, Nader has said
similar things before. "When [the Democrats] lose, they say it's
because they are not appealing to the Republican voters," Nader
told an audience in Madison, Wis., a few months ago, according to a
story in The Nation. "We want them to say they lost because a
progressive movement took away votes." That might make it sound
like Nader's goal is to defeat Gore in order to shift the
Democratic Party to the left. But in a more recent interview with
David Moberg in the socialist paper In These Times, Nader made it
clear that his real mission is to destroy and then replace the
Democratic Party altogether. According to Moberg, Nader talked
"about leading the Greens into a 'death struggle' with the
Democratic Party to determine which will be the majority party."
Nader further and shockingly explained that he hopes in the future
to run Green Party candidates around the country, including against
such progressive Democrats as Sen. Paul Wellstone of Minnesota,
Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, and Rep. Henry Waxman of California. "I
hate to use military analogies," Nader said, "but this is war on
the two parties."
Hitler analogies always lead to trouble, but the one here is
irresistible, since Nader is actually making the argument of the
German Communist Party circa 1932, which helped bring the Nazis to
power. I'm not comparing the Republicans to fascists, or the Greens
to Stalinists for that matter. But Nader and his supporters are
emulating a disturbing, familiar pattern of sectarian idiocy. You
hear these echoes whenever Nader criticizes Bush half-heartedly
then becomes enthusiastic and animated blasting the Green version
of the "social fascists"--Bill Clinton, Gore, and moderate
environmentalists. It's clear that the people he really despises
are those who half agree with him. To Nader, it is liberal
meliorists, not right-wing conservatives, who are the true enemies
of his effort to build a "genuine" progressive movement. He does
have a preference between Republicans and Democrats, and it's for
the party that he thinks will inflict maximum damage on the
environment, civil rights, labor rights, and so on. By assisting
his class enemy, Nader thinks he can help the wool from the eyes of
a sheeplike public.
If Nader's goal were actually progressive reform--a ban on soft
money, a higher minimum wage, health-care coverage for some of the
uninsured, a global warming treaty--it would be possible to say
that his strategy was breathtakingly stupid. But Nader's goal is
not progressive reform; it's a transformation in human
consciousness. His Green Party will not flourish under Democratic
presidents who lull the country into a sense of complacency by
making things moderately better. If it is to thrive, it needs
villainous, right-wing Republicans who will make things worse. Like
Pat Buchanan, Nader understands that his movement thrives on
misery. But the comparison is actually unfair to Buchanan (words I
never thought I'd write), because Buchanan doesn't work to create
more misery for the sake of making his movement grow the way Nader
does. From a strictly self-interested point of view, Nader's stance
is the more rational one.
So Gore supporters might as well quit warning the Green candidate
that he's going to put George Bush in White House. Ralph Nader is a
very intelligent man who knows exactly what's he doing. And they
only seem to be encouraging him.
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