Why We Should Vote For Ralph Nader by Barbara Ehrenreich

The Nation magazine
August 21/28, 2000

VOTE FOR NADER by BARBARA EHRENREICH

It must be some playful new postmodernist form of politics: First you spend
years ranting about the plutocracy that has supplanted American democracy
and is rapidly devouring the planet. You complain about the growing numbers
of Americans who can't afford healthcare or housing; you rant about the
inadequacy of wages and the arrogance of the corporate overclass.

Then, just as large numbers of people start tuning in and even getting
excited to the point of supporting the one presidential candidate who's
making the exact same points you've been trying to get across all this
time--you whip around and shout, "Only kidding, folks. Get out there and
vote for Gore!"

Normally I'm more responsive when summoned to help save a drowning man. But
none of the lefties for Gore are arguing that Gore has said or done anything
recently to earn progressive support. He's going down, is all, and going
down so quickly and inexplicably that no one can call him "wooden"
anymore--there's a question whether he's even carbon-based. Here he is,
faced with the frothiest Republican presidential hopeful since Dan Quayle,
and Gore can ignite no sparks, cannot even rise above his own fundraising
scandals or apparently grasp wherein the scandal lies. As recently as late
June, for example, he praised an audience of African-immigrant Americans for
their contributions to his campaign, promising that the money would be
"helping to focus the attention of our country on issues in Nigeria or
Ethiopia or Ghana or Cameroon or South Africa."

We are being summoned to save this inveterate bribe-seeker because "a vote
for Nader is a vote for Bush." That in itself is a disturbingly Orwellian
proposition, easily generalized to "Don't challenge the system, you'll only
make it worse." But leaving that aside, let us acknowledge that Bush is
indeed scarier than Gore on several discernible issues, abortion the most
prominent among them. Hence the familiar plea of the pro-Gore leftists: Keep
W.'s pudgy little fingers off the Supreme Court.

Ah, the Supreme Court! Never mind that pro-choice Justice O'Connor was a
Reagan appointee or that Clinton's man Breyer is one of the most
economically conservative Justices around--the Supreme Court gets dragged
out every four years to squash any attempt to escape the Democratic Party. So
it has been and so it will always be until we have a Court consisting
entirely of pro-choice teenagers.

Abortion, which is the issue I am most frequently Gored with by the
political "realists" of the left, deserves a closer look. Note first that
the prominence of this issue in the Gore/Bush race above all reflects the
loving concordance of the candidates on almost everything
else--militarization, incarceration and the necessary immiseration of
working people everywhere in the service of global capital. Note second that
what has vitiated abortion rights on the ground is not so much the legal
whittling away of Roe v. Wade (though quite a bit of that has gone on too,
at the state level) as the relentless pressure from antichoice groups on
abortion providers. And aside from reining in clinic picketers, there's not
a whole hell of a lot the Supreme Court can do to fix that.

It should be recalled, too, that we didn't get legal abortion in the first
place because nine men in black robes were kind enough to allow us to have
it. Women fought for it by every means possible, illegal as well as legal.
Surely the anti-Naderites of the left can agree that Roe v. Wade wasn't the
author of women's liberation, just as Brown v. Board of Education did not
create the civil rights movement. Deep social change is made by deep social
movements, not by edicts.

But the left-wing Gore-ites often seem oblivious to the dynamics of real
social change. They say we have to build an alternative politics--only just
not yet. Wait until we replace "winner take all" elections with something
more democratic, they urge. Fine, only where is the energy to reform the
electoral process going to come from unless we start challenging that
process with attractive third-party candidates now? Or they say wait until
we have a real party--who are these Greens, anyway? But parties don't just
grow by accretion. Sometimes they have to do things--grand, noble and, from
a "realistic" point of view, surely foolish things--like stepping into the
fray and duking it out with the bullies and their designated surrogates.

What I fear most about a Gore victory--yes, I said victory--is its almost
certainly debilitating effect on progressives and their organizations.
During the Clinton years, many a feminist, enviro and labor leader was so
charmed by the crumbs of "access" thrown their way and the occasional
low-level progressive appointment that they bit their tongues whenever
Clinton showed his true DLC colors, e.g., with welfare reform. And every
time I would sputter, "Dump this creep!" someone would whisper soothingly,
"But he's pro-choice (and so much more pro-labor and pro-tree than the other
guy)." Is this what we're going to hear when it comes time to protest the
war in Colombia or any other Gore-perpetrated horror? At the very least, the
progressive Gore-ites ought to explain how they intend to avoid getting into
another hostage situation should their man win.

But I can't get really mad at the Gore-ites of the left--there is such a
becoming and altogether seemly diffidence about them. To my knowledge, none
of them are sporting Gore buttons or bumper stickers, and I don't expect any
of them to invite me to a Gore house party anytime soon. While they may
firmly believe that "a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush," they seem also to
understand that a vote for Gore is a vote for the system as it stands--and
specifically for the DLC-dominated Democratic Party. Like it or not, that's
how the Gore votes will be counted, and that's how they'll be spun.

Here's how generous I am: I'll tell them what they can do if they'd like to
save Gore. They should stop flacking for him--stop all this carping about
"spoiling" and "vote stealing"--and explain to their man what he'd have to
do to start taking votes away from Nader. Like renouncing the substitution
of bribery for the democratic process. Like pledging to spend the budget
excess on such daily necessities as universal health insurance and
childcare. Like embracing a worker-friendly approach to world trade.

I doubt Gore could ever become Nader-like enough to steal my vote from the
original, certainly not after his choice of DLC leader Lieberman as Veep.
But it sure would be nice to see him try.

E-mail this story to a friend.
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Barbara Ehrenreich's forthcoming book, Nickel and Dimed, on low-wage work in
America, will be out in the spring of 2001.
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