“Run Away As Fast As You Can!”: Ralph Nader Wants Liberals To Back Rand Paul. Don’t Do It.
This week, Ralph Nader returned to the political stage with a new book, Unstoppable, whose triumphant subtitle is The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State. To kick off his publicity tour, he has argued that liberals should “definitely” impeach President Barack Obama, abandon the “international militarist” Hillary Clinton, and instead embrace Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) as a possible leader of his dream coalition.
To what end? In the book, Nader writes that by marrying the Left with the libertarian Right, we can cut off government support for corporations and have “honest government,” “fair taxation,” and “more opportunity.” Nader sees relatively low-hanging fruit in opposing “sovereignty-shredding global trade agreements, Wall Street bailouts, the overweening expansion of Federal Reserve power, and the serious intrusions of the USA PATRIOT Act against freedom and privacy.” He also articulates loftier, if not fully fleshed out, aspirations to “push for environmentalism,” “reform health care,” and “control more of the commons that we already own.”
Some liberal commentators, like Esquire‘s Charles Pierce and the American Prospect‘s Scott Lemieux, are dismissing Nader’s vision as fantastical, since the Right will never join his progressive crusade. But Nader’s vision should not be dismissed so quickly. He leads his book with concrete examples from the 1980s of when he put Left-Right coalitions together to stop an over-budget nuclear reactor project and to pass legislation to protect whistleblowers who uncover wasteful government fraud.
More recently, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.), and then-Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) joined forces to pass legislation auditing the Federal Reserve. Nader is correct that there are opportunities to build ideologically diverse coalitions and that coalition building is the key to getting most anything you want out of politics.
However, coalition building requires compromise and, most critically, prioritizing one set of issues over another. The trade-offs inherent in Nader’s path into Rand Paul’s arms should make liberals run screaming.
The Nader strategy of a permanent coalition with the libertarian Right greatly limits what liberals can accomplish. Where there is a joint desire to restrain government (end the drug war) and limit spending (stop corporate welfare), a Nader-Paul alliance can form. But you can forget about anything that involves new government regulation, higher taxes, and more spending. That would preclude big-ticket liberal priorities like capping carbon emissions, expanding anti-poverty programs, guaranteeing universal preschool, and investing in infrastructure.
Nader effectively deprioritizes those goals, because his primary agenda is to “Dismantle the Corporate State.” But the hard truth is that if liberals want to make progress on their core agenda, the coalition to nurture is not with the Paulistas. It’s with the CEOs.
The little-talked-about secret of most major liberal accomplishments over the past 80 years is that they received some degree of corporate support, at least enough to disempower conservative opposition. This is true for much of FDR’s New Deal, LBJ’s anti-poverty legislation, and environmental regulation, as well as Obama’s stimulus, repeal of the Bush tax cuts, Wall Street regulation, and health-care reform.
As I observed in the New York Times following the Supreme Court’s upholding of ObamaCare, “When corporations are divided or mollified, reformers can breathe. The president can be heard. Business owners can be convinced that they will remain profitable. The dim prospect of perpetual gridlock can be trumped by the allure of regulatory certainty.”
Nader wants to scrap this long, if quiet, history of liberal success that has built the pillars of modern activist government in favor of prioritizing a civil libertarian agenda. His strategy makes sense if you think smashing the NSA is more important than saving the climate or feeding the hungry. I suspect most liberals would not make that trade.
There’s nothing wrong with forging temporary, limited partnerships with whoever is willing to play ball at that moment. You can work with libertarians against corporations on global trade today, and cooperate with corporations against libertarians on funding infrastructure tomorrow.
But Nader’s vision goes beyond ad-hoc coalitions. He wants to permanently side with government-hating libertarians over government-accepting corporations. That may have superficial appeal to liberals currently agitated over income inequality, but it’s not the strategy that helped liberals in the past century build the social safety net, reduce poverty, and avoid another a Great Depression.
By: Bill Scher, The Week, May 2, 2014
“The Religion Of Unreason”: Creeds Are Not Built Up Out Of Facts
I think it’s safe to say that this period in history is one in which liberals have felt unusually exasperated with conservatives, perhaps more than ever before. I can say this with some confidence as a liberal who runs in liberal circles; it may well be that conservatives are also more exasperated with liberals than they have ever been. Our ability to feed that exasperation is driven by the fact that, for all the polarization of information sources, we’re actually more aware of what people on the other side say than we ever have been before. Fifteen years ago, I would have had no idea if Rush Limbaugh said something offensive, but today (once it rises to a certain level of horror), Media Matters will record it and put it on their web site, the Huffington Post will put it on their web site, and half a dozen people in my Twitter feed will let me know it happened. So there are all kinds of new ways to become appalled with your opponents.
And there’s nothing we liberals find more frustrating than the contemporary conservative aversion to facts, particularly on a few select topics, none more than health care. We like to think of ourselves as rational, thoughtful people, who arrive at our opinions after careful consideration, while the other side is fed by prejudices, insane conspiracy theories, and an inability to admit when the world doesn’t turn out the way they thought it would. Conservatives find this to be an unfair caricature, but they can’t deny that many, many people on their side are—let’s be charitable and say unconcerned—with the truth of the world. Barack Obama is a natural-born citizen, Hillary Clinton didn’t engineer Benghazi for nefarious ends, there were no death panels, the ACA doesn’t explode the deficit, people did indeed sign up for insurance, a system where people get subsidies from the government to buy private health policies they can use at private doctors is not “socialism,” and so on. And yet these ideas persist. With characteristic eloquence, Gary Wills explains why:
The irrelevance of evidence in the face of sacred causes explains the dogged denial of global warming, the deep belief that the Obama Administration was responsible for the killing of Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens in Benghazi and that Obama is not a legitimate American. To go back farther, it explains the claims that FDR arranged for the attack on Pearl Harbor and gave much of the world away to Stalin at Yalta (an idea Joe Scarborough is still clinging to). Repealing Obamacare will eventually go the way of repealing the New Deal. But the opposition will never fade entirely away—and it may well be strong enough in this year’s elections to determine the outcome. It is something people are willing to sacrifice for and feel noble about. Creeds are not built up out of facts. They are what make people reject all evidence that guns are more the cause of crime than the cure for it. The best preservative for unreason is to make a religion of it.
The priests of that religion are the media figures who pass down the injunctions from on high, telling their flocks what they should believe, whom they should hate, and what they should be angry about today. And the politicians? Some no doubt truly believe when they kneel at the altar. Others go through the motions, with an eye cast back over their shoulder at the pews to make sure everyone sees their piety. And some may even be looking forward to the time when a few of the religion’s more absurd tenets fall by the wayside, so they can tell the congregants what they want to hear without feeling like they’re feeding the madness of some unhinged cult.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, April 23, 2014
“Thinking Small”: Liberals, If You Really Want Your Activism To Have Impact, Set Your Sights Lower And Be In It For The Long Haul
There’s a discussion starting to bubble up in some corners, one that will grow in intensity as we approach 2016, asking where the left should go as Barack Obama heads for the exits a couple of years hence. In the latest issue of Harper’s, Adolph Reed offers a critique from the left of not just Obama but the liberals who support him. Our own Harold Meyerson offered a typically thoughtful criticism, to which Reed responded, but I’ll just add briefly that one of the many things I didn’t like about Reed’s piece was the way he poses a dichotomy for liberals between investing too much in winning presidential elections even if the Democrat is imperfect (not a complete waste of time, but close) and building a movement (much better), but doesn’t say what, specifically, this movement-building should consist of.
That’s a common problem. Movements are great, but creating and sustaining them is hard work, work most of us would rather not do. It also takes skill, timing, and a bit of luck. Most of us would agree that the decline of labor unions has been disastrous for the country in many ways, and I sometimes hear people say that what the left needs is a revival of the labor movement. That’d be great! If you have any ideas about how to do it, we’d all like to know.
Eight years ago I wrote a manifesto for liberals, and though not very many people read it, whenever I would speak to an audience about it, someone would always ask, “So what should we do? This isn’t an easy question to answer, but since the theme of the book was that liberals should learn from what conservatives had done right over the prior couple of decades, my best answer was to think nationally and act locally, in the same way conservatives do. Get a couple of friends together and stage a coup of your local Democratic committee. Run for school board, or dog catcher, or whatever office you think you can win. If you want to push the Democratic party to the left, trying to get Bernie Sanders to run for president isn’t going to do it. (Remember what a profound and lasting impact Kucinich for President had? Yeah.)
Reed would object that that sees activism only in relation to the Democratic party, which is true. It’s not the only kind of movement-building, but it’s a kind that works. Think about it this way: Mitch McConnell isn’t scared of the National Right To Life Committee; he knows that if they think he isn’t doing enough to outlaw abortion, there isn’t much they’re going to do about it. But over the last five years, he and every other national Republican have been absolutely terrified of the Tea Party. Why? Because the Tea Party has actually gotten Republican scalps.
Now the Tea Party is a unique case in the speed with which it accumulated power. But the principle of starting electorally at a low level still holds. The trouble is, the state rep race just isn’t as glamorous as the presidential race. Andrew Sabl gives an excellent account of why that is. He was responding to Markos Moulitsas’s argument that since Hillary Clinton is all but unbeatable, there’s no point in getting behind some kind of challenge to her from the left, and instead liberals should accept that Clinton is going to be the 2016 presidential nominee and focus on getting strong progressives elected in down-ballot races. I’ve weighed in on the presidential primary question (short version: HRC might be beaten by somebody, but not by an ideological crusade), but Sabl hits the nail on the head:
… the larger problem, not unique to progressives, lies in the incentives and capabilities of presidential campaigns, in their systematic, structural (and rational) attempts to obscure the above lessons in the service of driving donations and turnout. National campaigns, through the best technology and psychology money can buy, persuade us that giving them our money and time means becoming part of something important. (True! But it’s a small part.) They portray the consequences of every election as more epic and final than they are likely to be. They encourage the Hollywood fantasy that the presidential speeches that inspire partisans have the potential to sway huge numbers of moderate, and inattentive, voters. They crowd out our background awareness of how much policy that really matters—regarding taxes, roads, public transportation, schools, colleges, policing and public safety, public health, Medicaid coverage, and now health exchanges—is set by states, counties, and cities, not primarily by the President, nor by Congress. And the media, desperate to attract mass readers and viewers whose attention is drawn to the excitement and pageantry of national campaigns, have an interest in reinforcing these distorted impressions.
Indeed. And like Sabl, I’ll admit that I’m part of the problem—in 2016, I’m going to spend a lot more time writing about the presidential race than I will about anything else. But if you really want your activism to have impact, you have to set your sights lower, and be in it for the long haul. There’s a not-very-old saying that Republicans fear their base, while Democrats hate theirs. If you’re a liberal and you want to change that, the answer is to make high-ranking Democrats fear you. The reason they don’t isn’t that there haven’t been enough left-wing populist presidential campaigns. It’s that, unlike the right, the left hasn’t taken over the grass roots and started climbing up the tree, hurling off those who displease them along the way until the people at the top look down and conclude they have no choice but to give the base at least part of what they want.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, March 13, 2014
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