This is an excellent Letter to the Editor and also an editorial in today's Inquirer on why Nader's candidacy is, in my opinion, disingenuous and potentially so destructive. Some excerpts:
>From the letter:
"...He claims in his self-aggrandizing rhetoric, that he stands for all third parties against the current "duopoly" in Washington. But he ignores the reality that because winner takes all in the Electoral College system, there is no room for a third party. A third party candidate only acts as a spoiler for the party it is closest to."
Well, in nearly _any_ election, electoral or not, and regardless of how many parties are involved, winner _does_ take all. So this doesn't hold very well as a principle.
But the letter writer is also advancing another principle, namely, that third parties are inherently destructive to other parties with which they're somewhat sympathetic. In other words, the Libertarians are destructive to the Republicans, the Greens are harmful to the Democrats, etc. This is certainly true when two parties split the available votes almost evenly.
It helps to ask whether the "duopoly" is a desirable situation. I certainly don't think so, for many reasons. It essentially guarantees a consensus without any debate: each party will attempt to capture some imagined "middle," which means that they'll try more and more to sound like one another. One sees this in the Democrats' discussions of what an "electable" candidate is like: essentially, it's a Democrat who's not very different from a Republican. Frankly, I think this encourages an unprincipled politics.
And third parties can have a genuinely catalyzing effect on the two mainstream parties. After all, if the parties don't want to lose support to third parties, then they have to adjust to keep those people in the fold.
And from the editorial:
"...But without Nader in the picture in 2000, Bush's narrow Electoral College victory would have been impossible to scam..."
I think this is about as wrong as wrong can be. What about those registered Democrats who didn't vote? Surely they outnumbered the Green party's meager numbers, and their failure to participate was certainly a greater factor in making 2000 such a close race. What about the poll lead Gore enjoyed months pervious, which fizzled away over the campaign-- is it unthinkable that Gore didn't campaign well, or that Bush was a _better_ campaigner? What about the irregularities of the Florida polls (overseen by Republicans)? And there is the question over whether Gore won the popular vote: if he did (as most Democrats assert), then we can't blame Nader's votes for having cost Gore anything-- all the fault would rest with the messy post-election processes.
This is one of those points that I find extremely frustrating. Any sane appraisal of the 2000 elections will show that there were many factors which cost Gore the election. Many of them could be said to be crucial (and yes, one can have multiple "crucial" factors). Yet the Democrats expend far more anger at Ralph Nader than, say, Jeb Bush or Kathleen Willey or the Supreme Court. This, to me, indicates that something less than rational is going on in the party.
and...
"...The vital issue in this election is that a Republican sweep may make permanent the damage to the constitutional principle of checks and balances. How dare Nader ignore the reactionary cast of Bush's judicial appointments and the refusal of a Republican-controlled Congress to challenge the mendacity of this president on issues as varied and important as global warming and the pre-emptive, deceit-driven invasion of Iraq?..."
This is something that bothers me about Nader as well. Court appointments are not a minor issue, and it's a certainty that Bush'll be providing us with mini-Scalias and Rehnquists for the next four years. (It's interesting to note that two of the most liberal Justices on the bench were nominated by Ronald Reagan.) The fact that Bush has turned out to be far _worse_ than any sane person could imagine is why I was ready to throw my vote to whichever drone wins the Democratic nomination. (The reaction of the Democrats to Nader is _so_ overblown, so riddled with faulty logic, and damn near pathological, that I'm seriously toying with throwing Ralph a protest vote.)
But frankly, when Congress was dominated by Democrats, they haven't been all that enthusiastic about challenging right-wing mendacity, either. Gore's always sounded like more of an environmentalist than his actual record indicated, and we can thank Clinton for such wonders as welfare reform, NAFTA and GATT, and pre-emptive military strikes against Syria that weren't even reviewed by Congress or the UN. James Ridgeway in the _Village Voice_ pointed out that Nader's various organizations were the ones which brought Enron to light, which have been pushing the health-care issue, and Nader himself's been calling for Bush's impeachment over the Iraq war. Whic is better than what the Democrats have been doing. (Nader's been asking them to pursue any number of great initiatives over the years. If they'd pursue a fw of them, then maybe...)
This does leave a lot of us with a real problem. The Democrats cause less damage than the Republicans, and they don't seem to have a lot of religious lunatics in their ranks. That's nice. But their recent track record indicates that they're not terribly enthusiastic about fighting for anything that's truly important. The only time they seem to develop some kind of backbone is when they _have_ to, i.e., when the Republicans do something truly egregious. This makes it difficult to want to support them very much. And it makes a third party desirable, if only for the sake of scaring them into developing a spine.
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