Ralph Nader's Fading Legacy

In the year 2000 I sat in my bedroom at my parents' house, door shut and locked, official voting punch device in hand as I punch out chads in my ballot for the November election. I was voting truly absentee since we had yet to undertake early voting, and I was unable to travel home on election day. When I reached the tabs for President, I punched out the write-in selection and then proudly wrote, in bold, progressive handwriting (Courier New) the name of my selection: Ralph Nader.

His affiliation with the Green Party and its progressive values; his stance against corporate influence; his condemnation of the two party system; all of these things spoke to the idealist in me. His track record as a consumer advocate certainly helped. Nader is a legend, a giant. His uncompromised stands against corporate endangerment and fleecing of the population (see Unsafe at Any Speed) are principles upon which revolutions could be founded.

His campaign had a plan: make the 5% national mark and the Green party would receive matching federal funds for the 2004 campaign, helping them to get onto the radar screen. While they didn't hold delusions of winning the Presidency any time soon, they did have plans to drive the Democratic party back to its progressive roots by holding their feet to the fire in the form of votes. Don't want to strengthen those environmental regulations? Improve labor rights? Promote gay rights? Kiss a couple of million votes and the White House goodbye.

Nader didn't get his 5%, but he did manage a little over 3% and that was enough to stir the Democratic party into a hailstorm of derision. Nader had cleared more than enough votes in Florida to have shifted the election back in Al Gore's favor, even assuming that some of those people might not have voted at all without Nader's name on the ballot.

Then things changed.

George W. Bush and his neo-conservative agenda began riling up the left in the wake of September 11th, 2001. By the time the 2004 election came around, the nation was a frothing mass of vitriolic politics. In 2000, the nation seemed divided on indifference. In 2004, it was divided on perceptions of ideology. Despite the clear preference for most on the left to simply get Bush out of office, Nader mounted another campaign, this time without the Green Party in tow who had refused to nominate him. On the left, Nader became anathema. His cause was no longer idealistic, it was dangerous. The Democratic party, instead of moving towards Nader's ideas as the plan had originally been, isolated and shut him out. He netted a fraction of his 2000 vote total.

And then it happened.

I overheard my students using Nader's name as a joke. Who was this guy? Why was he running? They joked about voting for Nader, as if the idea were preposterous. Like writing in "Mickey Mouse." Part of this was out of pure ignorance of his advocacy record, but that's indicative of something larger. Ralph Nader's legacy, a legacy of great accomplishments and progressive, truly American politics, is being erased. Partly by the same conservative forces who opposed him in his heyday. Partly by himself.

Is this what happens to great forces who actually live long enough to have seen their great work come to fruition? If Martin Luther King Jr. had lived to see today, would he have put his foot in his mouth at some point? Would people mock him and his legacy because of an idealistic stand or two that took too little account of the reality of America?

Ralph Nader's legacy is fading. His accomplishments, so important to our day to day life, so much so that we don't even notice them, are being effaced by his late-life stands for progressive idealism. It certainly begs the question: Is Nader that out of touch, or have the neo-conservatives simply driven the game that far to the right? Is idealism truly dead? Or has it simply evolved in an ever more hostile world?

Ralph's on a one-man march into his own personal Selma. What that indicates about the rest of us, I've yet to figure out.