Buckle your chin strap, America: The man they call “consumer-advocate Ralph Nader” is running for president. His party is the Green party, and last week he issued something of a manifesto in the pages of the Nation. Titled “A Voice, Not an Echo” (itself an evocation of Barry Goldwater’s slogan in 1964), it assailed the Democrats and the Republicans — “the DemReps” — as a “two- party duopoly,” “essentially one corporate party with two heads,” albeit ” wearing different makeup.” There is no “counterpull,” Nader complained, “to the corporate, right-wing pull.” The parties are merely Tweedledum and Tweedledee, just as George Wallace, another crusading anti-establishmentarian, alleged. Bill Clinton, Christopher Dodd? They’re just “further corporatizing the Democratic party while signaling to progressives that they have nowhere else to go” (except, now, to Nader).
Striking about the manifesto was its unabashed use of the language of the Left. And the old Left, not the updated, politer one. We read of ” oligopolists” and “autocrats”; Clinton has paid “obeisance to the nuclear power and timber industries, and to the auto industry on fuel economy”; the ” major Clinton nominations” are “all Wall Street-approved.”
Also striking about the document was that, for a manifesto, there was really no program in it; only a harsh indictment of the major parties. And for something Green, there was barely a chirp about environmentalism. Nader never indicated what he would run on, apart from a paragraph of generalities about a “modest-sized party” that “focuses on new and stronger tools of democracy,” “breaks through the DemRep taboos,” and “brings into progressive politics a young generation of Americans.”
Nader and his Greens are now on the ballot in seven states, including California, generally agreed to be a must-win for Clinton. It’s oddly nice to know that the Left is back; at least you know where they stand.
