Confessions of a Nader Voter

Over on The Oregon Blog, Emma is decrying the “blame Nader” security blanket that is still being clutched so firmly by many democrats. Here’s part of what Emma said:

We’re invading Iraq because nearly every donkey in Washington was waving a gun in the air and screaming that we needed to INVADE. Is that Nader’s fault? Is it Nader’s fault that the Dems, by virtue of fantastically weak leadership, managed to be the only group ever to LOSE the congress during the off-year elections? At some point–and reasonable people can draw this line–you gotta give up the Nader excuse.

Two: Nader didn’t lose the election for Gore. If you gotta finger someone, start with Gore. He ran the worst Presidential campaign in history, fighting at every turn to demonstrate that he wasn’t as exhilarating as his opponent–who had trouble with words and admitted not having any idea where foreign nations were or who led them.

I partly agree, partly disagree with Emma.

Part one: Blame the Democrats

Of course, I agree with Emma that the state of the country is in large measuret the Democrats’ fault. What the Dems have failed to understand for 20 years is that part of their job isn’t just bending themselves to the dominant discourse, but trying to set that discourse.

Whatever I think of Republican leaders, I can’t say that men like Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich and George W. Bush are cowards. On the contrary, they’ve got audacity leaking out of their asses; over years they’ve driven the Republican party much further to the right than anyone imagined possible. Meanwhile, the Democrats – led by the DLC – spent those years in dogged pursuit of “the center,” taking on Republican values and compromising whenever politically possible.

What happens when the Democratic party leadership (in the form of the DLC) and the Republicans move simultaneously rightward? The center moves right as well. The DLC Democrats, lacking any vision beyond chasing the center, abdicated setting a national agenda to the Republicans. It is only because the Democrats have capitulated on so many issues that the Republicans have had the political freedom to move so incredibly far to the right. Why shouldn’t they? Whether Republicans pursue a needless, pointless war with Iraq, or budget-busting tax giveaways for the wealthiest, they can be confident that resistance from important and powerful Democrats will be no more than token.

The Democrats, in short, are the Republican right’s enablers.

And what have the Democrats gotten for their lack of principle? Party loyalists claim we must chose between being principled losers or capitulating winners, but those aren’t the only alternatives. Paul Wellstone showed us that there can be principled winners. And as the Democrats demonstrated in 2002, sometimes all capitulation does is make us unprincipled losers.

Part two: Blame Nader

Emma, like many Greens, says that Nader shouldn’t be blamed for Gore’s defeat. And there are certainly more likely candidates: a press corps that loathed Gore and never hesitated to show it, Jeb Bush’s magic act (watch The Amazing Jeb makes black votes disappear!), five traitors to Democracy on the Supreme Court, and of course Gore himself, who was dealt a winning hand (great economy, popular administration) and still folded.

All of that is true.

But it’s also Nader’s fault, in the simple sense that if Nader hadn’t run, Gore would have won.

I’m not talking about comparing Nader’s vote total to Gore’s losery margin (which presumes, wrongly, that 100% of Nader voters would otherwise have voted for Gore). I’m talking about a neck-and-neck campaign in which Gore wasted advertising dollars and precious candidate appearances in Democratic “safe states” – or, rather, states that would have been safe if not for Nader. Suppose all those pro-Gore commercials broadcast in Oregon – not to mention Gore’s appearance here in the final weeks of his campaign – had been in Florida instead?

It probably would have made the difference.

But then again, wasn’t that the whole idea?

Seriously. By 2000, the Democratic Party had finally moved further to the right than many of us could stomach. In effect, the Democrats had decided that they no longer needed the left in their coalition. So a small part of the left – but the part that was good at organizing rallies and finding hundreds of volunteers in the pre-election months – threw their (our) support to Nader.

It was a desperate move, but one we felt we had to make, because we could see that the Democrats were blowing it. We could see that the Democrats – ever-compromising, ever-abdicating – were enabling the Republicans to move the national discourse further and further to the right with each national election. As I wrote in 2000:

A vote for Gore isn’t just a vote against Bush. A vote for Gore is a vote for the Democrats to continue moving further and further to the right. Liberals who vote for Gore/Lieberman are sending a message that, no matter how awful Democrats get, liberals will vote for them, so there’s no need for the Democrats to take liberal views into account.

Bush and the Republicans have been a horror – even worse than I expected. But that doesn’t prove to me I was wrong; that shows me I was righter than I knew. By refusing to take a stand, by compromising at every opportunity, and by being the party of no principles, the Democrats have enabled the Republicans to move further right than ever before.

Part three: 2004

It’s nice that left and liberal bloggers are getting along fairly well… for now. I wonder if it’s just temporary, though; the conflict between leftists and Democrats hasn’t gone away, it’s just submerged for a while. I remember in 2000 and 2001, it seemed to me that Democrats hated Greens far more than they hated Republicans. I suspect we’ll be in that place again 15 months from now. I suspect that I’ll be listed on many fewer blogrolls when November 2004 rolls around.

The basic conflict is that you Democrats think that we Greens are throwing away – oops, sorry, “spoiling” – elections in the name of abstract moral principles. And we Greens think you Democrats are trading the long-term viability of everything we believe in, in exchange for short-run electoral victories (victories that might not ever come about in reality).

Assuming the Greens run a presidential candidate, Is there any way Greens and Democrats can get through the 2004 elections without returning to our stations at each other’s throats?

Update: There’s a new Nathan Newman post criticizing the DLC.

Update 2: Mark Kleiman responds in a not-unexpected manner.

Update 3: Nathan Newman makes a solid argument in response to me and Emma..