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People I quote too frequently, part XXIII.

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December 4, 2003

Looks like rain. Ralph Nader, considering another presidential run, dismisses progressive enthusiasm for Howard Dean:
“Everybody is starved. If you have a garden and if it rains, you’re not excited, but if you’re in the desert and it rains, you’re delirious. But you know what rain in the desert produces? A mirage.”
Actually, what rain in the desert tends to produce is an extravaganza of flowers and other botanical exuberance, since desert plants tend to be optimized to make the most of any moisture they can find. Here’s a sample image.

A rainy spell in the desert is not the classic set of conditions that produces mirages. A mirage is an optical illusion in which atmospheric refraction by a layer of hot air distorts or inverts reflections of distant objects. It appears that Ralph Nader can’t tell the difference between standing water and hot air.

It’s sad, really. Ralph Nader (Princeton, 1955, magna cum laude) probably did know all this, before the dementia set in. [11:18 AM]

Welcome to Electrolite's comments section.
Hard-Hitting Moderator: Teresa Nielsen Hayden.

Comments on Looks like rain.:

Jeffguy ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2003, 12:38 PM:

What bothers me is that with this (flawed) metaphor, he's putting himself out as the only one who isn't "delirious" about rain in the desert. In the desert, any rain is good rain. Come on, get happy.

Mike Ward ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2003, 12:46 PM:

DESPAIR. The thought that Ralph may run again.

Ralph, Ralph, twenty years ago I would have had your baby; but now you're not even that used condom from our last date. Go live in Arizona with your stepmother, and stop calling me.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2003, 12:55 PM:

Nice picture. Here are some more from home.

Pity about Nader. He's obviously thinking of that mirage where you see what looks like a distant silver sheet of standing water. Very confused of him.

It's also clear that he's never had a garden, or been well acquainted with a gardener, which surprises me a little. Gardeners can get quite excited about rain, or the lack thereof. Come to think of it, he's also set "having a garden" and "being in the desert" in opposition, and that's inaccurate too.

He's not thinking clearly at all.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2003, 12:58 PM:

If y'all read the rest of that Nation piece which quoted Nader, you'll find that many Greens would also rather drink Drano than run Ralph again. Indeed, the article made me feel warmer toward Greens than I have in quite some time.

Which isn't to say they aren't fundamentally a class enemy still. (Insert inscrutable emoticon, half joking and half not.)

Kellie ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2003, 01:25 PM:

Bad speechwriter. Bad, bad! It's a neat idea. A pretty metaphor that could've been used better by someone claiming to represent the environment. For example, the rains cause brief flowerings in the desert. He could've said something along the lines of "But you know what rain in the desert produces? A season of blooming lushness followed by months of prickly cactuses." Which still isn't accurate, but at least it's closer to the mark and serves to make Dean more ominous. Assuming that was his intent in the first place. Maybe he should've just gone for the obvious: "Ye though I walk through the valley of the shadow of Dean."

Out of curiosity, why are the greens quasi enemies? Is it because they embrace extreme environmentalist groups like PETA (which I don't know that they do, but they would be more likely to do so than, say, the Democrats)? Or is it because they take votes away from Democratic candidates? My only real exposure to a Green party platform was the Green party in Germany, and I don't think that would translate very accurately to the US.

northernLights ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2003, 01:39 PM:

That is a very embarrassing thing for someone in the Green Party to say.

Sorry I missed where your picture was taken. I was in Arizona once when it rained and it was amazing to see so many cacti bloom overnight.

If water happens to go into a temporary pond, there is a general explosion of life, and that is not a mirage. One year in farm country there was so much rain that some of the wetlands started to reclaim themselves, and there were tiger salamanders everywhere.

Keith ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2003, 02:03 PM:

Ralph has truely lost his last marble. He should be building coolitions against Bush. If he had half a clue he'd encourage the Greens to vote Dean (or whomever the nominee ends up) being and then settle into the petty ideology after we have a sane government again. Unfortunately he comes off sounding like a petulant third grader, the last one picked for the dodge ball team. And that truely is a lousy metaphore.

Barry ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2003, 02:37 PM:

From Kellie:

"Out of curiosity, why are the greens quasi enemies? Is it because they embrace extreme environmentalist groups like PETA (which I don't know that they do, but they would be more likely to do so than, say, the Democrats)? Or is it because they take votes away from Democratic candidates? My only real exposure to a Green party platform was the Green party in Germany, and I don't think that would translate very accurately to the US."

Nader claimed that there was no difference between the Democrats and the Republicans, and that he wanted the Republicans to win. He took actions which were clearly aimed for that goal (such as campaigning in swing states).

And afterwards, was absolutely unrepentant.

People who believe both that there is a difference, and that the Democrats are better, have been understandaly p*ssed for the past three years.

sean ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2003, 02:57 PM:

I first registered Green when I was 18. I'm 34 now and I voted green in the last election. Nader's metaphor was horrible, and I won't vote for him if he runs again.

That said, the Democrats lost the last election all by themselves last time. If they actually lost it, given the Supreme Court nonsense. Gore was an admitted Born Again Christian, and pro-death penalty, and just as steeped in oil money as Bush. Even though Bush was anathema to me, Gore crossed too many lines for me to vote for him, even if he was less evil than his opponent. I'm sure I'll be shouted down for saying this, as I am every time I say it, but that's what I believe.

The democrats are blowing it again. They will lost to Bush in a landslide and they won't have the Green party or the supreme court to blame this time. I will vote for the Dems because I can't stand Bush. But I think they have done a pretty poor job of defending our democracy and upholding our rights in the face of Ashcroft's onslaught.

sennoma ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2003, 03:00 PM:

Nader claimed that there was no difference between the Democrats and the Republicans, and that he wanted the Republicans to win. He took actions which were clearly aimed for that goal (such as campaigning in swing states).

Now that's something I hadn't heard. I wasn't in the US in 2000, so I can easily imagine missing it, but in all the "Nader good! No, Nader bad!" arguments I've read and heard, no one has made the claim that Nader wanted the GOP to win, said so, and deliberately tried to make it happen. (For instance, campaigning in swing states could have been just campaigning where he thought he could pick up votes; I'd want more evidence than that of his intent to precipitate a Bush win.)

If that's true -- and I'd like to hear more if anyone has info -- it changes my perception of Nader and the Greens considerably (and for the worse).

Adam Rice ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2003, 03:01 PM:

I voted for Gore, and can't see myself voting for a Green candidate anytime soon (not because they're an alternative party--because I actually disagree with their planks). That said, if Nader really believes there's no real difference between the Dems and Reps, he should stick to his guns.

In fact, I would encourage him to reiterate this belief regularly, as it will show even his supporters that he is cracked.

Chuck Divine ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2003, 03:19 PM:

I believe Al Gore would be President today if he had picked up one idea from the Bush campaign: Get enough sleep.

Gore started out his campaign comfortably ahead of Bush. The economy seemed to be in good shape. The country was at peace. Clinton's policies were popular if the man himself was not.

Gore also began his campaign with a twenty eight hour swing to show the "hard working American people" he was going to work hard for them. This is plain nuts. I want a President who is coherent and capable of rational thought. Not a fool who thinks he's some kind of superman.

I also must fault Clinton and the Democratic party a bit. Somebody should have taken Gore aside and asked him to not run for the good of the party. It might have a free for all, but Gore was a truly awful candidate. Check out Ed Rendell's views on him.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2003, 03:29 PM:

I'd like to avoid another round of mutual recrimination over 2000, but I would also like to make two points, which I hope are taken in in good spirit.

First, I certainly agree with Sean Bosker that the Democratic Party has had its drawbacks as an effective opposition. Where I part company with the argument of Nader-in-2000 supporters is when they argue that this meant the Democrats "deserved to lose," as if the only moral interests in play were those of the national political parties. Maybe the Democrats "deserved to lose." I'm quite certain that millions of Americans whose lives have been made worse by the Bush regime didn't "deserve" to suffer for Terry McAuliffe's flaws, whatever those may have been. Then again, I am vehemently a meliorist, and always opposed to the seductive argument that it helps to make things worse in order to "heighten the contradictions."

Second, I don't actually think of Greens as "class enemies", not full-time at any rate. But I do have an old leftist's suspicion of certain strands of Green ideology. Let's see: a tendency to value aesthetics over people; an attachment to romantic views of landscape and "wilderness"; a tropism toward eliminationist rhetoric about whole classes of people. We've seen these things before.

I do recognize that plenty of self-identified Greens don't display these characteristics. I'm explaining my joke and my intermittent suspicions, not putting forth an argument.

Oh, and by the way, as far as Gore being such an awful candidate, gee, yeah, he was so terrible that he got a half-million votes more than the other guy, and in fact more votes than any other Presidential candidate in history save for Reagan in 1984. Please, spare us the It's All Al Gore's Fault routine. Some people will blame the victim of any mugging, because it's just so important to establish that the world is a negotiable and knowable system of rules and operations, and so frightening and painful to admit that sometimes disasters happen and the bad guys win.

Lydia Nickerson ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2003, 03:53 PM:

Nader campaigned here in Minnesota, normally considered to be safe Democratic country, well after it was noted that things were running pretty darn close here, and that there was a slim chance for Bush to win. Minnesota also has a pretty powerful Green presence, so this is a state that he had a good chance of turning over to Bush. I also heard Nader say that "things have to get worse before they get better," a political strategy which harks back to various unpleasant revolutionary theories of political power, and has very little in common with democracy. Nader was a "feel-good" vote. It also had real consequences. I resent people who claim that their momentary good feeling had no consequences, or those who think that the results don't matter. Things are so much worse than I ever thought possible, and people who supposedly share many of my values are still gloating. Makes me want to slug them, and I'm a generally peaceable person.

On the other hand, it really looks as if Nader's old news, at this point. I don't see how he could possibly set himself up as any kind of left-leaning candidate, this year. He's probably still dangerous, he'll probably try to depress voter turn-out, but I can't imagine he'll be the player he was last time.

Sean Bosker ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2003, 03:58 PM:

Well, as a green, I'm certainly eager to put the wreckage of the past behind me and pull for anyone ANYONE who has any chance of beating Bush. We've suffered under the lash long enough.

The Clean Air Act has been defanged, and they're taking on the Clean Water Act next. The new prescription drug package that was just passed bans drugs from Canada, so my friends with HIV just saw their drug costs go from $1,200 a month to $2,000 a month. For now they're still getting the drugs from Canada. We'll see how Ashcroft actually enforces this one. It's a horror, that's for sure, and the left needs as little divisiveness as possible.

Kellie ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2003, 04:02 PM:

Patrick wrote: a tendency to value aesthetics over people;

Meh. In today's visual and commercial age, most everybody does this to one extent or another.

an attachment to romantic views of landscape and "wilderness";

Again, meh.

a tropism toward eliminationist rhetoric about whole classes of people.

OK, that got the alarm bells ringing.

Thanks for your reasoning. Point taken.

Barry, I'm with sennoma. Got any more info to back up Nader's desire to help the Reps win 2000?

Teresa Nielsen Hayden ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2003, 05:42 PM:

You can translate "Things have to get worse before they get better" as "Things have to get worse in order for everyone to see that I'm right and they're wrong," but I think it more accurately translates as "I will countenance no good unless it's my own good, arrived at via my own programs and my own schedule; and this adherence to my program matters more to me than the good itself."

I don't know of many situations where it's true that having things get worse leads to them getting better: root canal, growing out a bad haircut, having the city replace the water mains under your street; stuff like that. Otherwise, one of the really notable characteristics of good is that it's good, no matter how it's done or by whom. This also serves to maintain universal parity, since bad is still bad even if a normally good person does it.

Historically, working toward One Big Revolution has had far more disastrous failure modes, and been far less effective, than doing whatever good can be managed now, and continuing to work toward whatever good remains to be achieved. The pinkos who worked for change in the first part of the 20th century never brought on a general strike, and seldom got anyone into office; but many of them lived to see their once-radical platforms gradually adopted, on a piecemeal basis, as the official policies of the United States government.

Gradual change is long and hard and frustrating. It's not nearly as much fun as taking your banner and megaphone out into the street, announcing that you're the vanguard, and waiting for the parade to form up behind you. But you have to ask yourself who's done more good: the workers for gradual change, or the non-ameliorationist revolutionary hardliners?

Something of an afterthought: Another way to look at the "Things have to get worse before they can get better" trope is to ask how much worse things have to get. The answer is, they have to get bad enough for the speaker's program to be adopted, but one ought not let them get worse than that. Which is to say, that line is not an observation about the natural operation of the universe; it's a statement of preferred strategy.

(...)

I'll vouch for the ubiquity of Nader supporters in 2000 who said that there was no difference between the two major parties. It is a failure of Christian charity on my part that I still haven't entirely forgiven Will Shetterly for being one of them. Every time Bush & Co. do something outstandingly awful, I have to stifle the impulse to send Will a note in e-mail asking whether this was what he had in mind.

Will, if you see this comment, please bear in mind that I haven't sent them.

Emma ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2003, 06:03 PM:

Cruising around the blogosphere lately, I've noticed that news of Nader seems to be the hottest news there is. And I've got news about that news: it ain't good. People hate Nader--right, left, Dems, Republicans, even a number of past voters. This is due in large part, sadly, to Nader himself. His pathological urge to paint all Democrats with one brush, to demonize vast swaths of the left--these have left him with increasingly fewer friends.

I voted for Ralph in '96 and '00. In this case, it's two votes and you're out. True progressives have Kucinich, and if Dean emerges, he'll be the strongest leftist candidate since LBJ. Nader's jealous that the left has forgotten him, I'm afraid.

auduboner ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2003, 06:04 PM:

What a fine exchange of comments! And not a troll in sight. Kudos in particular to Lydia and our esteemed moderator, Teresa. Thank you, Patrick.

Kevin Andrew Murphy ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2003, 06:04 PM:

There's also the problem with Ralph's metaphor in that he starts with "Everybody is starved" and then goes on to talking about rain.

You usually want rain if you're thirsty, or dying of thirst. Rain may bring you some food down the road if you're hungry, but extra water doesn't do you much good if you're starving.

I'm registered as a Green, but mostly because I want them to get more districting, not because I support every item in their platform. Few Democrats or Republicans support every item of their party's platforms either. Two of my best friends voted for Bush because they were voting for the 2nd Amendment, not for the religious oil industry nonsense, and are profoundly embarrassed about many of the things their man has been doing. I tend to vote a 1st Amendment ticket, and last election voted for Gore, though was honestly less-than-thrilled with his V-chip BS and his record-censoring wife. But compared to the anti-flag-burning prayer-in-school Republicans, he was by far the lesser of two evils.

If someone came up with a strict Constitution party, rather than the pick-and-choose business we have going now, they'd be getting a lot of people signing up.

Kellie ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2003, 06:29 PM:

Emma, Ralph was in the news during the recall election. But, alas, that news wasn't too good either. Well, I suppose that depends on your perspective. My favorite line: "As TV cameras rolled, Nader reflexively threw remnants of the pie in the direction of the culprit, who fled out a side door and was not apprehended." Ah yes, that omnipresent Attack Your Attacker reflex. Didn't realize it applied to Pie Assaults.

Graydon ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2003, 06:34 PM:

The problem with being a strict constitutionalist is that the folks who wrote the constitution weren't prophets.

The Canadian one is -- conceptually, structurally, whatever you want to use to describe the effort of writing it, as distinct from the date of adoption -- maybe thirty, forty years old; it's been in effect for twenty one. And we're already running into things that the folks who wrote it just were not thinking about.

Yours is coming up on two hundred and fifty, in those same age-of-constructing-thoughts terms. Pre-certainty in a contingent universe, pre-cheap communications, pre-industrial culture, pre-any of the forms of social organization existing today. There are just plain going to be swathes of society it doesn't cover.

Being absolutist about a constitution, like any other absolutism, is a tactic of insisting that the problem isn't really this complicated.

An inistence that the problem itself is certain to ignore.

tost ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2003, 06:38 PM:

A couple more things to consider.

Back in the summer of 2000, I spent a few hours talking with two Greens, arguing that they should put aside their voice of dissonance and vote for Gore. In retrospect, that was a huge mistake. I should have taken the summer and fall off and moved from Montana to Florida with the same platform. Of course, back then nobody fully understood the ramifications of a Bush presidency, or how foolish Nader would look in retrospect.

What amazes me now is how easily Ralph still co-opts the spotlight. The man played his hand and the American people, no, strike that, the entire world, has suffered as a result. You'd think he'd be content with that. He should be.

Patrick, one thing you might clarify. When you mentioned the Green's "tendency to value aesthetics over people," were you actually serious? I live in a remote valley in northwestern Montana, along with a couple hundred other folks, several of whom are Greens. I'm obviously not a Green, but I spend a fair amount of time talking with a few of them and I've never heard any of them refer to the preference you mentioned. Now if you're talking about nature, about wilderness, about an intimate and living connection with the incredibly mysterious world we live in and what the Native Americans refered to as The-spirit-that-moves-through-all-things, well then, yes, I suppose I can see where you're coming from. Although I don't think I'd agree with you.

For instance, a couple weeks back, I was standing by myself on a timbered mountainside in the gathering November gloam, transfixed by the deep, mournful howls of an alpha wolf and his mate. Would I trade that experience for a cocktail party or the opportunity to spend an hour at a Star Trek convention? Not a chance.

But if you're talking about choosing pretty scenery over people, I guess I don't see that as being an accurate depiction of your typical Green, at least not in my experience.

Teresa - You wrote. "You can translate "Things have to get worse before they get better" as "Things have to get worse in order for everyone to see that I'm right and they're wrong," but I think it more accurately translates as "I will countenance no good unless it's my own good, arrived at via my own programs and my own schedule; and this adherence to my program matters more to me than the good itself."

That was perfect. Sad, too - I think at one time Nader was on the cusp of being a wonderful human being - but perfect.

Donald Johnson ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2003, 06:45 PM:

You 2000 Gore-voters come across as every bit as self-righteous as we 2000 Nader-supporters. There's the same desire to score debating points and establish your own version of moral superiority.

It's what makes me feel an inextinguishable bond of kinship with you guys. Group hug, everyone.

I won't vote for Nader in 2004 and it saddens me that he isn't acting more like his supporter in 2000, Michael Moore. But Nader was right about one rather important point--if the Democrats take the left for granted, they'll continue moving to the right on the theory that that's where to go for new votes. It's what's been happening since maybe Reagan's day. I don't know what to do about this, except to harbor the rather forlorn hope that maybe a Dean victory (if that happens) will teach the Democrats they don't have to pick people like Lieberman as a VP candidate whose debate with Cheney seemed like a lovefest (at least in my memory). Voting for Nader isn't the solution. Bashing him and acting like there isn't any truth to what he said isn't a solution either. Of course there's a difference between Demos and Repugs, and even Nader admitted it, though it's easier to argue against his soundbite moments when he equated them.

If a Democrat does win, even a relatively moderate to centrist one, I will be very happy that Bush is out. But I'm also worried we'll see the Democrats resume their rightward drift.

Claude Muncey ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2003, 06:50 PM:

Kellie and sennoma, I would suggest starting with Jacob Wiseberg's election morning 2000 analysis It's sectarian idiocy in the Guardian and Slate.

But really, the question shouldn't be the one liberals seem to be asking about why Nader is doing what he's doing. The question should be why anyone is surprised. For some time now, Nader has made it perfectly clear that his campaign isn't about trying to pull the Democrats back to the left. Rather, his strategy is the Leninist one of "heightening the contradictions". It's not just that Nader is willing to take a chance of being personally responsible for electing Bush. It's that he's actively trying to elect Bush because he thinks that social conditions in American need to get worse before they can better.

Nader often makes this "the worse, the better" point on the stump in relation to Republicans and the environment. He says that the Reagan-era interior secretary James Watt was useful because he was a "provocateur" for change, noting that Watt spurred a massive boost in the Sierra Club's membership. More recently, Nader applied the same logic to Bush himself. Here's the Los Angeles Times' account of a speech Nader gave at Chapman University in Orange, California, last week: "After lambasting Gore as part of a do-nothing Clinton administration, Nader said, 'If it were a choice between a provocateur and an anaesthetiser, I'd rather have a provocateur. It would mobilise us.' "

Lest this remark be considered an aberration, Nader has said similar things before. "When [the Democrats] lose, they say it's because they are not appealing to the Republican voters," Nader told an audience in Madison, Wisconsin, a few months ago, according to a story in the Nation. "We want them to say they lost because a progressive movement took away votes."

That might make it sound like Nader's goal is to defeat Gore in order to shift the Democratic party to the left. But in a more recent interview with David Moberg in the socialist paper In These Times, Nader made it clear that his real mission is to destroy and then replace the Democratic party altogether. According to Moberg, Nader talked "about leading the Greens into a 'death struggle' with the Democratic party to determine which will be the majority party". Nader further and shockingly explained that he hopes in the future to run Green party candidates around the country, including against such progressive Democrats as Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota, Senator Russell Feingold of Wisconsin, and Representative Henry Waxman of California. "I hate to use military analogies," Nader said, "but this is war on the two parties."

One should remember that Nader did just that aginst Wellstone.


sennoma ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2003, 07:43 PM:

Claude, thanks for the link. I misunderstood Nader's goals -- I thought he was trying to build a bridge to a three-or-more-party system by getting the 5%, push the discourse left and stay out of Gore's way otherwise. That article makes it pretty clear that Nader has been about "heightening the contradictions" from day one. I personally think that strategy wrong-headed. Suppose that GOP excesses after 2000 do indeed shift the vote left: is it not likely that this will hand a subsequent election (please, please let it be 04) to a Dem candidate well before any kind of radical restructuring of the Dem party, or radical Green shift in the vote, can happen?

Avedon ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2003, 09:00 PM:

"A mirage is an optical illusion in which atmospheric refraction by a layer of hot air distorts or inverts reflections of distant objects."

I think this is the group of images you wanted for that.

CHip ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2003, 10:07 PM:

Graydon: Bless the founding fathers for the exquisitely Newtonian eighteenth-century machinery of the Constitution, and curse them for visiting it in all its unworkable beauty on the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. (C. M. Kornbluth, The Syndic)

On the other hand, one of the my occasional pleasures is imagining Madison saying "Oh, I didn't mean them!" when one of his Bill of Rights amendments is extended over another fault line in the human race.

I'm glad to see enough other quotes baring Nader's ]principles[; I made the mistake of getting into an argument with China Mieville about this and didn't have enough material to cover with (and I wasn't going to ask if he'd really read my hometown paper, where one of the no-difference quotes appeared).

I'm also dismayed by the rightward drift of the Democrats -- and I wonder how much it simply cranks up the Republican machine; I sometimes think Clinton frightened the Republicans into pandering to the worst fears of the public because he was taking over the middle with Reagan's patented we're-all-OK smarm instead of being a decently geekish/pollish/prissy loser like previous Democrats. I would love to have an inkling of what would work; Truman (?-"Given a choice between a fake Republican and a real Republican, people will vote for the real Republican"-), Hightower ("The only things in the middle of the road are yellow lines and dead armadillos."), et al. have nice stirring lines, but I can't begin to guess which moves will garner enough voters to outweigh the pro-reactionary distortion of the Electoral College.

Dean might do it; he seems to be convincing some young people that disinvolved cynicism isn't cool. (The AARP may be despicable, but politicians know that most of its members vote.) He sounds like the best campaigner of the lot, which makes him an obvious choice after the log puppet the Democrats put up last time.

Mr Ripley ::: (view all by) ::: December 04, 2003, 11:31 PM:

For all that I found Nader's "plague-on-both-your-houses" schtik to be a sinister force, I don't blame him or Gore's campaign strategies for Bush's being in the White House. John Nichols, among others, has documented the lengths to which the Rethugs were ready to go to get their man in, to the extent that it's conceivable they could have done it just fine without Nader's agitation in FL and NH; Bob Somerby et al tirelessly report on the sycophancy of the press in these matters. Indeed, the whole "Gore was a weak campaigner" meme owes a lot to that press, and the spin it put on the debates. I'd discourage Greens from buying into it.

But what I wanted to say was, Nader was at Princeton together with Rumsfeld? There's gotta be a story in that. Or maybe some slashfic by, you know, the Roy Orbison guy.

Scott Lynch ::: (view all by) ::: December 05, 2003, 02:18 AM:

Tost wrote:

For instance, a couple weeks back, I was standing by myself on a timbered mountainside in the gathering November gloam, transfixed by the deep, mournful howls of an alpha wolf and his mate. Would I trade that experience for a cocktail party or the opportunity to spend an hour at a Star Trek convention? Not a chance.

Tost, you lucky schmoo... here in the Twin Cities we have an abundance of wooded and deserted spots where we can pretend that we're wandering in Northern Eriador for a few hours at a time, but no wolves that I know of. Plenty of raccoons, though-- in my neighborhood, they live in the sewers and patrol the streets at night in small units. Their mournful screeches are, um, perhaps not as majestic as those of woodland lupines.

Back on topic, though-- you might not have traded your mountainside experience for a chance to drink cocktails with Klingon poets, but someone else might have. And if I may presume to expand on Patrick's comments (while hiding under a rock and praying for forgiveness), I think he was referring to people who not only have an idealized, romanticized view of nature, but wish to enforce their aesthetic values (and the inconveniences involved!) upon others, regardless of how those others feel or what they happen to need.

I love the wilderness, the woods and cliffs around Lake Superior in particular. I also love many things about my cities-- they have libraries, geek-hobby stores, skyscrapers, 24-hour coffee shops, and other cool things, plus they contain the vast majority of my friends and associates. I like to spend time in both the wilderness and the city, but the moment someone else tries to when and how I should do so, based on their own aesthetic feelings, my conversational "Check Engine" light comes on.

It's not really about which experience, urban or wilderness, is "better." It's about interfering with the right of other human beings to make their own choices about when and how they want to have those experiences.

Donald Johnson ::: (view all by) ::: December 05, 2003, 08:03 AM:

Just to elaborate further on what I said earlier, the problem with the Gore/Nader war is that both sides then and now "debated" serious issues by screaming oversimplified soundbites at each other. Nader and his supporters in their demagogic moments would talk about Tweedledee and Tweedledum. In their more sensible moments, Nader and his supporters would admit that there were differences, but there was a steady rightward drift in the Democratic Party, caused in part because unlike Republicans with their conservative supporters, the Democrats as a whole took their liberal/left supporters for granted and constantly shifted to the right looking for votes. Gore spent much of his second debate agreeing with Bush, and again if my memory is correct, Lieberman was very deferential to Dick Cheney, almost as if the Democrats themselves took this claim that Cheney was a seasoned stateman seriously. Gore supporters in their turn would focus on the more extreme Nader claim, because it is something they could easily refute. They usually refused to admit that there was any problem.

So I agree that the Nader candidacy as a solution to the rightward drift of the Democrats was the wrong medicine, but it's not exactly comforting to see people pretend that Nader's diagnosis of the illness was completely incorrect. Anyone watching prominent Democrats supporting Bush at crucial times in the past few years knows that Nader had a point. Gore, to his great credit, has been one of the outstanding exceptions to this, but the Gore of late 2002 to the present isn't the same Gore that picked Lieberman as his running mate.


Liberals pride themselves on their superiority over conservatives for preferring to engage in serious polite discussions rather than shouting matches where each side spouts its favorite bumper-sticker slogans, but that alleged distinction vanishes when Nader's name comes up. I'd like to see people discussing how to keep the Democrats from veering right while still managing to win elections. On the other hand, there are many Democrats who want the Democrats to be a centrist or maybe even slightly right-of-center party-- these people would actually be glad to have Nader around to siphon off liberal votes if they could win without them. Since they can't, they want liberals to vote Democratic and then sit back and shut up as the rightward drift continues.

sean ::: (view all by) ::: December 05, 2003, 08:32 AM:

One of the most cogent remarks on this thread:


"Otherwise, one of the really notable characteristics of good is that it's good."

I'm gonna have to use that one.

Graydon ::: (view all by) ::: December 05, 2003, 09:05 AM:

CHip -

People do what addresses their insecurities, what they percieve to be in their present best interest.

If people are shifting to the right, that's hardly surprising, given the constant, pervasive, and frankly wacked level of corpratist propaganda saturating the United States.

Single best thing y'all could do is take civil rights away from corporations. Could even spin that one into a reasonably successful campaign issue -- 'money isn't speech', 'politics for the people', and so on. This would be in actual opposition to the present move to enserf, rather than arguing that such enserfment should be conducted in a more genteel way.

BSD ::: (view all by) ::: December 05, 2003, 10:11 AM:

Nader monkeywrenched the last election for his own egoboo. Moore supported him then, but has seen the bankruptcy of agitprop for agitprop's sake: He has evolved from random provocateur to valuable weapong against the dub. Its a pity Nader didn't learn the same lesson; he would have been a powerful ally in the coming battle.

That said, I'd like to remind all that Dean is not the leftiest of the hopers: He is left, certainly, of Lieberman and Edwards, and even with Gephardt (though that's reversed on certain issues), but not only are Sharpton and Kucinich to the left of him, but Kerry is as well.

I just wish Kerry would take the gloves off. And not to attack Dean; far more mileage would be gained by attacking W without pause or mercy.

(Of course, that doesn't mean that I won't accept Dean: I'm with Kerry now, but if, as it seems likely, Dean goes over the top, I'll raise his banner with pride.)

sennoma ::: (view all by) ::: December 05, 2003, 11:05 AM:

Single best thing y'all could do is take civil rights away from corporations.

YES! Damn straight, right on, amen; preach on, brother!

Kellie ::: (view all by) ::: December 05, 2003, 11:24 AM:

Thanks for the link, Claude. I'm struck by Nader's quote, "But this war is on both parties." How does actively campaigning in ways to help Bush get into power count as a warring with the Republicans? Was he hoping to lure Bush into power and then squash him? If so, how? It seems Nader has a problem with bad metaphors.

julia ::: (view all by) ::: December 05, 2003, 11:45 AM:

I volunteered for Mark Green against Al D'Amato after I read Who Runs Congress">Who Runs Congress. Nader has done important work.

Unfortunately, I think at some point the abyss looked back into him. It's sort of sad, kind of like what happened to Ed Koch once his crusading liberalism didn't get the immediate response he wanted. At some point, do the right thing morphed into do what I tell you.

By that time, it really wasn't the right thing any more.

julia ::: (view all by) ::: December 05, 2003, 11:46 AM:

and what a graceful link that was...

Well, at least it goes to the right place.

tost ::: (view all by) ::: December 05, 2003, 12:15 PM:

Scott - You wrote, "And if I may presume to expand on Patrick's comments (while hiding under a rock and praying for forgiveness), I think he was referring to people who not only have an idealized, romanticized view of nature, but wish to enforce their aesthetic values (and the inconveniences involved!) upon others, regardless of how those others feel or what they happen to need."

Good synopsis of your idea, but somewhat tricky. We all, either consciously or unconsciously, tend to elevate our perceptions (Graydon just made a similar point) or, to put it differently, our way of looking at the world. After all, it's only natural that we think of our views on life as a close approximation of Truth; perhaps the closest approximation possible in this physical world. So naturally, since I know that my way of looking at the world is best and since others believe the same thing of their views, then life, especially life of the political and social variety, is comprised mostly of our attempts to shift, sway or coerce others toward our viewpoint. For those of us who are aware of this, we may also decide that it's in our best interest to remain open to the very real possibility that our perceptions are erroneous; after all, the ultimate goal is to get closer and closer to that ideal of Truth (you could also say Understanding). And to do so, we may eventually have to admit that we were wrong on certain issues and that we didn't know everything there was to know about others.

So I empathize with your desire not to be told what to do, where to live, how to act, etc., etc., but I don't think that Greens, or any other group for that matter, have a monopoly on the stuff we're talking about. The Green way of looking at things may be far enough outside the accepted social and political norms of our day - heck, it's not the way I choose to look at the world - that it's a little discordant, but it's really no different than any other group of individuals. At one time or another, we all shake our heads and say, "Lord, it's so simple. Why don't they get it?" In a larger sense, it's part of the human condition, and that's probally not going to change. The trick, of course, is to remain aware of all this as we go through life. Being a vastly imperfect being, I need to remind myself all the time. And even that doesn't always work.

Scott Lynch ::: (view all by) ::: December 05, 2003, 01:30 PM:

Tost wrote:

but I don't think that Greens, or any other group for that matter, have a monopoly on the stuff we're talking about.

True, but irrelevant, because they're the ones we are talking about. The fact that they're not alone in wishing to enforce their very amusing desires upon others isn't lost to me, and I don't imagine for a second it was lost on Patrick, but those "others" weren't who he was talking about.

Inevitibly, on Electrolite as in life, someone calls a certain group a bunch of wackos or idiots, and someone else comes along and says (for reasons very well-meaning, and for reasons otherwise) "Oh, but they're not the only ones who're a bunch of wackos and idiots." It pops up all the time in Republican/Democrat arguments, for example:

Poster A: "Christ, the Bush Administration is corrupt!"

Poster B: "So what? The Democrats were corrupt, too. Politicians have been corrupt since Moses was on infant formula."

The first problem is that this retort is not a refutation. The second problem is that if you examine the logic, the fact that human nature can be ugly is simultaneously presented as a credit to one side and a detriment to the other.

To get back to the Greens-- yes, millions of people across the world don't know their own asses from Holy Writ, and are too eager to have administrative privileges on the message board of life. Patrick has slammed them in his own good time, and will no doubt slam them again and again and again.

But "They" weren't in the cross-hairs in this particular instance; the Greens were. It doesn't make them uniquely stupid in all the world; it just makes them the noun of choice for Patrick's adjectives. In this thread, at this time, and so forth.

Cheers!

SL

Barry ::: (view all by) ::: December 05, 2003, 02:08 PM:

BTW - I've found ~10K sites where the 'no difference line' is cited, but not the full texts of the speeched. There's not a lot of Nader's speeches readily findable. The closest I've been able to find is at: http://www.mollyivins.com/showArticle.asp?ArticleID=560

(look near the bottom).

Lydia Nickerson ::: (view all by) ::: December 05, 2003, 04:05 PM:

Donald Johnson wrote:

So I agree that the Nader candidacy as a solution to the rightward drift of the Democrats was the wrong medicine, but it's not exactly comforting to see people pretend that Nader's diagnosis of the illness was completely incorrect. Anyone watching prominent Democrats supporting Bush at crucial times in the past few years knows that Nader had a point.

Yes, the critique had some value. Almost everyone I know who tried to engage the Greens on the topic yielded that point instantly. The point on which we didn't yield was the that the Democrats and Republicans were Tweedledum and Tweedledee, that Bush couldn't do worse than Gore. We knew better, and we said so, over and over and over and over. The Greens preached despair, abdication, and irresponsibility, all under the disguise of moral rectitude. *spit* And that is why I remain so fucking pissed at the Greens. A choice between the lesser of two evils is still a choice. Politics aren't about feeling good, but doing good. Voting is a way of excercising self-determination, it is not a moral act floating out in space, devoid of anything but symbolic meaning. Unless, of course, democracy isn't real.

Xopher ::: (view all by) ::: December 05, 2003, 04:06 PM:

Scott Lynch, I think I...love you.

In the most platontic, amiable-slug-on-the-shoulder, let's-go-out-for-a-root-beer kind of way, of course. Fnord.

Randolph Fritz ::: (view all by) ::: December 05, 2003, 04:11 PM:

I tend to agree that Nader is pretty much a dead issue at this point--the one to look out for this year is Kucinich, who may make internal problems in the Democratic party and whose ideas about Iraq, if incorporated into the Democratic platform, like to become messy failures.

Let me suggest that the energy that we are now putting into the Nader/not argument might be more usefully channelled into reforms that make it possible for voters to more easily find and support political positions that they prefer. This is near-to impossible for us at this time. As two fine awful examples I give you the State of Washington, which is planning to cancel its primaries, and my Democratic Senator, who voted for the recent awful Medicare bill.

Donald Johnson ::: (view all by) ::: December 05, 2003, 04:13 PM:

I'm sure you won't want to buy it, but Nader-haters (and Nader-lovers and those of us in-between) can find out what the man thinks from reading his book "Crashing the Party". In the index, under "major political parties", there 23 cites for "convergence of" and 4 citations for ""differences between".

Glancing through it, I still think he makes some very good points and the fact is that since 2000 mainstream "liberals" have moved away from Clinton/Gore policies and towards the views of Nader. You can see this in that flagship of the supposedly liberal media, the New York Times, which used to treat the anti-globalization movement with complete disdain, as did the Clinton/Gore administration. (See virtually any column by Tom Friedman during the Clinton era or even by Paul Krugman, though he's become much more balanced since then. And I think the NYT news coverage of antiglobalization protestors was at best patronizing). It wasn't until Joseph Stiglitz came out with his insider's perspective and started saying that antiglobalization protestors were making some valid points that the NYT suddenly seemed to wake up to this. Nader was there all along. Tom Friedman, that towering liberal guru of the Clinton/Gore era, generally saw antiglobalization protestors as half-witted Stalinists in puppet suits.

On my own personal human rights obsession, Nader said that the sanctions on Iraq were wrong. It was Madelaine Albright who said on Sixty Minutes that she thought that the containment of Saddam justified a sanctions policy which caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children. To my mind, that was a difference between Nader and Gore/Bush that mattered. People in the Gore camp rightly think they can score some good points showing the important differences between Gore and Bush, but to some of us Nader voters, the differences between Gore and Nader loomed just as large. I've come to realize that we're screwed-- we have to pick the Presidential candidate who is likely to accumulate a lower bodycount, but the outrage of Gore voters doesn't impress me much, because I can work up a fair amount of outrage myself on some issues. Big deal. If you can't work up some genuine moral outrage over some of the Democratic policies that Nader condemned, then you aren't trying very hard.

And just to make it clear, in case people reading this didn't notice my earlier posts, I'm a firm almost fanatical convert to "lesser of two evilism" who is voting for the Democrat next year no matter who he is.

Claude Muncey ::: (view all by) ::: December 05, 2003, 09:45 PM:

Long ago, I worked as a computer consultant and opinion analyst for political campaigns, including some good sized congressional races. This was after discovering that most journalists barely earn enough to eat regularly and sleep indoors, and was the start of my professional life with computer systems. I learned I could respect a person whose positions or tactics I disagreed with, if I thought those positions were honestly held, and that person was willing to take responsibility for the results of their decisions, including unintended consequences. Being an adult means knowing that sometimes it is your responsibility, even if it isn't your fault.

Some posters here have said, in effect, that while one should not vote for Nader in 2004, and voting for him in 2000 may or may not have been a good move, Nader prestented superior ideas and policies and earned a legitimate place in the political discussion of 2000.

Quite honestly, I don't give a good goddam what his views are now, or what they were in 2000. The only place that his actions in recent years have earned him is the permanent seat in the political wilderness next to Lyndon LaRouche. Even if you accept the unlikely idea that he really didn't see any significant difference between Gore and Bush, you have to deal with the choices he made of where and how to campaign in 2000 and since. In 2000, he was advised in private then warned in public by former members of his own staff that he risked both a Bush victory and the failure of his own effort to get the Greens 5% of the popular vote (which really would have made a positive difference) by not concentrating on "safe" states where he had potentially solid support and by opposing "vote trading" schemes. Since then, he has never been willing to take the slightest responsibility for the outcome of the 2000 election, blaming everyone but himself. From the mollyivins.com interview:

The question is, "Are you now repentant?" I mean, just think of the arrogance behind that. I said to a [radio talk show] caller, what would you have me do? Long pause. Because the only answer is, "Not run." And when you say "Not run," the argument92s over96the country belongs to two parties. They either say "Don92t run" or that I should have dropped out.

This is breathtaking, coming from someone who so often denounced false choices preseted by others. Running or not running was never the question and he damm well knows it. And then working to run a Green candidate in opposition to Paul Wellstone? I can well understand if Green party leaders were to treat Nader as if he were radioactive because he has done nothing but long term damage to the aims of that party.

My first class on my first day in graduate school was public policy. The instructor asked us for a definition of public policy and we gave a variety of answers, all of them wrong. He said that "the policy of a public body or agency is what it actually does," and the class went on from there. It does not matter what your ideas or proposals are if you cannot find some way to put them into effect. Few individuals in this country should have a better idea than Ralph Nader of that, and the reality of what it takes to achieve it. It is hard for me to believe that the real consequences of his actions were completely unforseen by Nader. I have to wonder just what his objectives include, as it is evident that real change in public policy does not appear to be one of his aims. I can neither trust nor respect him, at this point.

If your intention is to vote against Bush next year, even if you have to hold your nose, excellent. You have my sincere thanks in advance. But don't expect a single word of approval from me (or, I suspect, many others) for one of the most irresponsible and untrustworthy men in American public life today. And considering some of his competition, that's saying quite a lot.

Avedon ::: (view all by) ::: December 06, 2003, 12:40 AM:

The sad thing is that Nader had capital he really could have invested more wisely and usefully, if he'd just moved out of DC and run for a state Congressional seat as a Democrat. Or, hell, even as a Republican - in some states, back in the day, that would actually have seemed normal. And I think he could have won, and every time a real progressive wins, the Dems do have to think about that stupid fantasy they have that they just aren't right-wing enough.

Instead, Nader has drawn progressives out of the Democratic Party and made it that much more likely each time that the more right-ward candidate will win, and thus convinced the party that they aren't far enough right yet. *sigh*

And yes, I do put the blame for the 2000 outcome on the press more than anyone, given that Gore was headed for a landslide right up until the smear campaign after the first debate. That is, he didn't need those Nader voters if the press had just held back on the lies about the debates. But still, if Gore had had those Nader voters in Florida, or even a quarter of them, he still had it in the bag. Always assuming Ms. Harris would have allowed him to collect them, of course.

Jonathan Vos Post ::: (view all by) ::: December 06, 2003, 12:41 AM:

The set of people who are thinking of responding to Lydia's saying "I also heard Nader say that 'things have to get worse before they get better,'" with the saying: "The list of things that are going to get worse before they get better, will get longer before it gets shorter," will get larger unless I post this and make it smaller.

For those of the Green persuasion, is it more important to beat deeply anti-ecology Bush, or to elect someone likely to advance a green agenda as such? Just wondering. Also hearing rumors online that Karl Rove wants Bush to make a Big Idea announcement either in 17 Dec 2003 (Wright Brothers' First Flight Centenary) or State of the Union Address. Rumor is he wants us to go back to the Moon, which I favor, even though it's a ploy to make us forget job loss, deficit, and war.

So, remember that old joke? NASA's planning on putting a restauarant on the Moon. Great food; no atmosphere.

the talking dog ::: (view all by) ::: December 06, 2003, 01:57 AM:

I believe the expression is "The perfect is the enemy of the good". To Ralph, 100% ideological purity has always been more important than having to "compromise" to achieve only 99 or 98% of his wanted agenda.

But in the end, although one should feel free to want to kick his ass and to certainly issue him stern tongue lashings, its (currently) a free country (no thanks to Ralph, btw)-- and God knows its his absolute constitutional right to run.

I still get the feeling that the only reason the Green Party exists AT ALL is as an insurance policy for the GOP. Note how it seems to hang on, while its likely counterweight, the "Reform" Party, seems nowhere to be found.

Buzz ::: (view all by) ::: December 06, 2003, 03:00 AM:

Well put, Donald Johnson. My thoughts pretty closely.

Robert L ::: (view all by) ::: December 06, 2003, 07:11 AM:

Donald, Buzz: Mine too.

I have a slightly better view of Gore and a far worse view of Bush than I had at the time of the election, which is why I will vote Democratic, even if (shudder) Lieberman is nominated. But I will be choking as I do it. And that's why I donn't spend much time Nader-bashing.

julia ::: (view all by) ::: December 06, 2003, 12:12 PM:

>the failure of his own effort to get the Greens 5% of the popular vote (which really would have made a positive difference)

Sadly, no - if Nader had gotten 5%, the money would have gone to Nader. Note here that his official campaign was not a Green organization, and it was that "official" campaign which would have gotten the money. The Greens would have gotten neither a slot on the ballot nor matching funds.

One imagines that at some point Mr. Nader noted this fact.

Barry ::: (view all by) ::: December 06, 2003, 12:51 PM:

From Donald Johnson:

"I'm sure you won't want to buy it, but Nader-haters (and Nader-lovers and those of us in-between) can find out what the man thinks from reading his book "Crashing the Party". In the index, under "major political parties", there 23 cites for "convergence of" and 4 citations for ""differences between"."

Thanks, Donald.


"Glancing through it, I still think he makes some very good points and the fact is that since 2000 mainstream "liberals" have moved away from Clinton/Gore policies and towards the views of Nader. You can see this in that flagship of the supposedly liberal media, the New York Times, which used to treat the anti-globalization movement with complete disdain, as did the Clinton/Gore administration. (See virtually any column by Tom Friedman during the Clinton era or even by Paul Krugman, though he's become much more balanced since then. And I think the NYT news coverage of antiglobalization protestors was at best patronizing). It wasn't until Joseph Stiglitz came out with his insider's perspective and started saying that antiglobalization protestors were making some valid points that the NYT suddenly seemed to wake up to this. Nader was there all along. Tom Friedman, that towering liberal guru of the Clinton/Gore era, generally saw antiglobalization protestors as half-witted Stalinists in puppet suits."

I agree, but I think that it's due to centrists and liberals being more out of power than for decades. We don't have the necessity of arguing for a doable agenda; we're free to discuss the horribleness of the agenda which is being done to us.

Jon H ::: (view all by) ::: December 06, 2003, 01:16 PM:

Donald Johnson writes: "Gore spent much of his second debate agreeing with Bush"

Yes, but Bush was almost certainly lying, so in fact their true positions would not be as close as they seemed.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden ::: (view all by) ::: December 06, 2003, 06:14 PM:

Possibly relevant to this discussion:

If fundamental changes are not on the agenda 97 as the very act of elections, parliamentarism, and the existence of a non-revolutionary situation make the people understand 97 then it is quite natural that the deprived masses, who have no alternative but to be satisfied with reform, should vote for reformist personalities and parties within the ruling class itself 97 personalities and parties that, as they see it, have the actual possibility to bring those reforms about. The problem of the Left is not that the allocation of the seats is not proportionate to the number of direct votes, or that the neighbourhood Trotskyist party does not have equal possibilities for propaganda to eventually secure one seat out of four hundred. The problem is that, under normal circumstances, the workers do not regard someone who wants to become a member of the parliament for four years from a revolutionary position against capital a good representative for pursuing their interests through this particular channel.

That's Iranian leftist Mansoor Hekmat, discovered to the blogosphere by Ken MacLeod and subsequently quoted by David Moles.

Hekmat is talking to fellow leftists, but his basic observation stands up no matter what kind of ideology you espouse. What Hekmat is observing is that regular people often have perfectly "radical" views about the power relationships that pervade society, and yet they vote for moderates and incremental reformer, not because they've been hypnotized or bamboozled, but because they've made a rational calculation that moderates and incrementalists can deliver actual goods.

Mitch Wagner ::: (view all by) ::: December 06, 2003, 08:11 PM:

TNH: "But you have to ask yourself who's done more good: the workers for gradual change, or the non-ameliorationist revolutionary hardliners?"

Um, both? The revolutionary hardliners motivate the establishment out of fear, the workers for gradual change show the establishment that the hardliners' goals are, actually, the right thing to do, even though the hardliners themselves are bad.

Put me down as another person who opposed Bush, but who had no idea things were going to get THIS bad. When Bush won, I shrugged and said to myself, "Well, most of the candidates I support, lose. What else is new?" I had no idea how that question would be answered.

Graydon: "Single best thing y'all could do is take civil rights away from corporations."

How do you do that without taking away the civil rights of the people who make up those corporations?

Donald Johnson ::: (view all by) ::: December 07, 2003, 10:48 AM:

Mitch, my very limited understanding is that corporations have some sort of status as persons, with rights, and that before this was put into law (maybe in the late 1800's), corporations were under a different set of laws.

A corporation and the people that work for it are two different sorts of entities. (Um, duh.)
If a corporation is sued for every penny it has, the people who work for it won't be bankrupted if it loses. If a corporation's right to lie about conditions in overseas sweatshops is revoked, individuals working for it can still buy ads and lie with their own money on their own time.

adamsj ::: (view all by) ::: December 07, 2003, 03:58 PM:

Unlike Nader, this guy might have the skills to pay the bills--but I've already decided to join the Democratic Party.

Mitch Wagner ::: (view all by) ::: December 07, 2003, 04:14 PM:

Donald Johnson: Mitch, my very limited understanding is that corporations have some sort of status as persons, with rights, and that before this was put into law (maybe in the late 1800's), corporations were under a different set of laws.

I have read that too, many times in many places, but I'd like to see a serious article on the subject. It's starting to pick up the odor of a kind of utopianism to me. You know how some conservatives do (or used to) go on about how if we only went back to the gold standard, the economy would be fixed? Other people are convinced that income taxes are illegal, and they can therefore refuse to pay or file returns -- with impunity? This notion that corporations have hijacked the Republic seems to em to be the liberal version of that kind of fixation.

Corporations are simply groups of people who have banded together to do some specific function.

Of course, there are some corporations that DO have too much influence over government policy: health care companies, energy companies, defense contractors, Diebold. But we don't need to create a doctrine of "corporate personhood" to explain that, it's simply a case of the rich hijacking public policy, as they have done since the invention of money.

Randolph Fritz ::: (view all by) ::: December 07, 2003, 04:44 PM:

Too much is made of the legal language, here. A corporation is a person (the legal language is "artificial person" or "fictious person") in the sense that it has the right to enter into contracts, to sue, to own property, and so on, also the responsibility to respond to suits, pay taxes, obey property laws, and so on. Corporations can only act through human agents, of course. Originally, corporations were government agencies, with powers derived from and similar to the government itself; most US town and cities are corporations. The thing added in 19th century US law was actually a limitation of their powers--they become devices to encourage business investment, and were subject to criminal and civil law. See Nolo Press for an accessible legal definition, FindLaw for a short legal definition, and dictionary.law.com for one that lawyers might use.

The idea that corporations have human rights--free speech, equal protection, and so on--is a legal doctrine dating to the late 19th century. It has never been embodied in a written court decision or statute as far as I can tell and it would probably take a constitutional amendment or Supreme Court action to change the doctrine. Before oral arguments in SANTA CLARA COUNTY v. SOUTHERN PAC. R. CO., 118 U.S. 394 (1886) Chief Justice Waite said, "The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does." And so it became legal doctrine. The decision itself, if one drags through the long-winded thing, turns on narrow points of tax assessment and does not directly address corporate rights.

A number of justices, notably Hugo Black and William O. Douglas, have opined that this is very bad law, far from the intent of the 14th amendment, but they never managed to assemble a Court majority to overturn it. See Douglas's dissent (Black concurring) in WHEELING STEEL CORP. V. GLANDER, 337 U.S. 562 (1949). Personally, I wish the whole doctrine would go away.

Corporations are legally subject to criminal law--as artficial persons they are subject to legal responsibilities as well as granted legal rights--but it is simply common practice not to prosecute them. I wish that would change, too.

However, most of the anti-corporation types I've encountered want to discard the shield for investors as well, and that seems to me a valuable protection for small investors and perhaps even a reasonable protection for large investors--one does not want to see banks going down because some of the businesses they invest in loose really big lawsuits.

So, in my view there is some substance to this argument, but a great deal of crackpottery as well.

Kellie ::: (view all by) ::: December 08, 2003, 11:19 AM:

Scott Lynch wrote: "It pops up all the time in Republican/Democrat arguments, for example:

Poster A: "Christ, the Bush Administration is corrupt!"

Poster B: "So what? The Democrats were corrupt, too. Politicians have been corrupt since Moses was on infant formula."

The first problem is that this retort is not a refutation. The second problem is that if you examine the logic, the fact that human nature can be ugly is simultaneously presented as a credit to one side and a detriment to the other.

It also pops up in Democratic/Republican discussions in the following fashion:

Poster X: "The Bush Administration is corrupt. I miss the Clinton days because shit like this never happend. My man Clinton was a saint when it came to politics."

Poster Y: "Gimme a break. The Democrats were corrupt, too. Politicians have been corrupt since Moses was on infant formula."

I wasn't paying close enough attention to the comments to see if anyone was traipsing down this path. My guess is that tost read something that sounded to him like Poster X. In which case it does become a refutation, not of the accusations about the Bush administration, but of the praise of the Clinton administration. And it points out the equity of evil in politics - everyone's got it, some are just better at hiding it, some deny they have it even while using it, and some want to use it as much as possible and tell you it's for the best. By equity, I mean that it can't be a detriment to one and a credit to another.

Patrick Nielsen Hayden ::: (view all by) ::: December 08, 2003, 12:09 PM:

Nonetheless, in politics as in life, it often turns out that one "side" is, when all is said and done, substantially better or worse than another.

Kellie ::: (view all by) ::: December 08, 2003, 12:54 PM:

Patrick, true. And then we get into matters of opinion as to what constitutes "better" and "worse", and all hell breaks loose.

I did have some long and drawn out post about comparing the lesser of two evils concept to bad food and what it does to the palate, but this thread already has enough bad metaphors. :)

Debbie Notkin ::: (view all by) ::: December 08, 2003, 03:36 PM:

I am neither a lawyer nor an expert on this topic, so take everything with salt.

As I understand it, the doctrine of corporate personhood (referenced above) is really what keeps Mitch Wagner's statement "Corporations are simply groups of people who have banded together to do some specific function." from being the truth that it should be.

Because it was legally Enron and not the Enron officers and directors who perpetrated the theft from Enron employees, no one is fully liable for the damage, though some individuals can be prosecuted for their part in it.

Along with the doctrine of corporate personhood comes the repeatedly upheld legal American doctrine often described as "money is speech." In other words, the right to free speech is legally considered equivalent to the right to spend your money however you want to, including to influence policy. Free speech gives you the right to try to convince people to your point of view; because money is speech, it gives you the right to spend money to convince people to your point of view. And because corporations are persons, corporations thus have the right to spend their money to convince their (our) legislators to write laws in their (not our) interests.

The problem goes a lot further than that, in many directions. I personally have never heard an extension from "get rid of the doctrine of corporate personhood" to as Randolph suggests, discarding the shield for investors as well. But I do know that I don't want entities that don't breathe and don't shit having the same rights that I have, and a lot more money to shore up those rights.

Randolph Fritz ::: (view all by) ::: December 08, 2003, 04:08 PM:

Debbie, your position accords with that of former Justices Black and Douglas. Yet even under current law corporations have a duty to obey criminal law, just as natural persons do; being a corporation is not a defense.

There is, however, a pervasive pro-business bias in the US court system. Crimes committed by businessmen, especially corporate officers, are often not prosecuted aggressively. In addition, the investigative functions of the executive have been gutted over the past 25 years. In the case of Enron in particular, the gutting of the SEC under Reagan, and the FERC under I-don't-know-who relaxed oversight until, finally, there was no-one to notice that Enron was both fraudulent and defrauded until, at last, it could not meet its debts.

Derek Lowe ::: (view all by) ::: December 09, 2003, 02:13 PM:

I'm pretty sure that I'm to the right, politically, of most everyone here, but I wanted to chime in regarding Patrick's warning-signs comment about the Greens. "Eliminationist rhetoric" should set off alarm bells, of course, and in most people it does. (I'd cross the street to avoid anyone who thinks it's tolerable. Crossing an ocean has been necessary in more severe cases from the literature.)

But don't discount the trouble that comes with "attachment to romantic views of landscape and wilderness", either. That's a sign of a worldview that can lead to truly harmful ideas about human nature and society. You end up with bad analyses of current problems, and horrific attempts at fixing them.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau has a lot to answer for, although perhaps I'm just trying to posthumously shoot the messenger.

Barry ::: (view all by) ::: December 09, 2003, 02:49 PM:

From Debbie Notkin:

"As I understand it, the doctrine of corporate personhood (referenced above) is really what keeps Mitch Wagner's statement "Corporations are simply groups of people who have banded together to do some specific function." from being the truth that it should be."

Excellently put, Debbie.

Mitch Wagner ::: (view all by) ::: December 09, 2003, 04:13 PM:

Randolph Fritz: "There is, however, a pervasive pro-business bias in the US court system. Crimes committed by businessmen, especially corporate officers, are often not prosecuted aggressively."

This is the problem -- not corporate personhood but rather, pro-business bias.

And not just pro-business bias, but race and class bias. White-collar crimes are simply not treated as harshly as theft and burglary.

Graydon ::: (view all by) ::: December 09, 2003, 04:28 PM:

Mitch -

Pro-business bias is certainly a problem, but corporate personhood is also a problem.

Once you have a system where organizations which don't have individual human purposes can exist, you allow those organizations direct input into the political process at your very considerable structural/systematic peril.

No conspiracy, no malice, no ill will has to be postulated to get that, just natural selection and competition for resouces, once of which is human effort.

Lis ::: (view all by) ::: December 19, 2003, 12:26 PM:

FYI, the Nader Exploratory committee have just posted a very deceptively worded survey asking whether Nader should run in 2004.

Julie ::: (view all by) ::: January 02, 2004, 03:18 PM:

Congratulations - You have been googlewhacked - yours is the only website to give a hit for "bamboozled lupines"