I have just checked. The domain www.nader2004.com is still for sale - thank God! Ralph Nader is still deciding whether to run. But whatever he decides, US progressives have a resolution of their own to make: that this is not the time to split.
The last presidential election in the US hung on many threads: hanging chads, recounts, and court decisions. But progressives in the US do themselves no good for the future dwelling on them. Instead, they have the courage to ask themselves why it was so dang close in the first place.
There are many reasons for that too. Al Gore effectively ran a postmodern candidacy where his aides spent as much time briefing on his alpha male clothes and his problems with the truth as his policies. But whatever shirt he wore, it was clearly stuffed; while he fatally severed the link with all that was good in the Clinton presidency. Many commentators over here also failed to pick up that Bush came over as nice – as homely, even.
But the fault was not just with the Democratic party. It lay with the wider progressive community that did not rally to it. The difference between Gore and Bush in Florida was 537 votes. Nader scored 97,488 votes there. No one disputes the right of parties to run or people to vote as they choose. But after what happened in 2000 it is vital to remember that a vote is not a pure expression of choice, like buying a t-shirt, it is an act of selection that has real consequences and responsibility.
I went to observe a packed meeting in Madison Square Gardens during the 2000 race, where Ralph Nader, Michael Moore and others were denying that there was a hair of difference between Gore and Bush and so it was time to vote Green.
It was a scintillating meeting. No one’s heart could fail to accelerate when laying aside all caution, eschewing the etiolated mainstream liberal platform and just singing out beliefs. It was wonderful and reckless. We know the cost now. Bush’s regressive tax cuts and his gutting of government support programmes vividly shows up the divide between him and the Democrats. The cost is not paid by the mainly young, mainly aspirational, Manhattan audience who cheered Nader, but by those without health insurance, on low incomes or without work.
There is a case for more bravery in US progressive politics. But the time to assemble that case is between elections. If Nader and the Green party run again, it will be after three years of silence. It will simply look like a cynical bid to gain federal funds for their party by getting five percent of the vote.
Democrats have to learn to understand the spirit of the Green party, and the spirit that is selling millions of Michael Moore books across the US. It is a spirit of satisfied discontent. The world, especially the political world, is seen as a venal comedy of corruption and hypocrisy. Pragmatism, prioritising and compromise are equally presented as ‘bullshit’ and ‘spin’. There is a sad sigh, a shrug and then back to the same counsel of perfection. This is the spirit that is keeping so many, especially young people, away from politics.
Democrats must make people understand the consequence of their vote, and of their not voting. Democrats also must make people enact the choices of policy-making and government, and so acknowledge that there is bad and better, as well as perfection and despair.
The Republican party has shown its hunger for power goes beyond campaigning to win elections. It spent years trying to remove Clinton, it fought for the 2000 election in the courts, it recalled the California governor in a campaign started only weeks after his re-election. In fact, Republicans have put down every election lost since Nixon as some accident to their natural entitlement that should be put right, either at the next election or, in the meantime, in the courts.
No one wants the same attitude from the left - just two months’ unity every four years.