<nettime> Nader - 'heightening the contradictions'?

[Leahsouth@aol.com]

<nettime> got this in it's inbox, as one of a seemingly random set of CC:
recipients. There appears to be part of the first sentence missing. Although
its authorship is unclear, (whether authored by the person whose email is
indicated, or by someone else, perhaps at Slate (slate.msn.com)), I forward it
to the list for your consideration. No media angle really, however I note that
of late from afar, I have heard Nader supporters use this reasoning about
'getting worse before it gets better' as a justification, even an outright
reason, for lauding Bush's apparently impending re-election (whatever Nader's
own debatable role in helping these barely-reconstructed early 80s cold-war
warriors and back-room 'black-op' sleaze manipulators back into power). Which
strikes this nettime-admin-monkey as a throwback to thinking found amongst some
Leninist vanguardists of the 70s and 80s, or even, to a liberal-democratic
version of the type of thinking like that found in Red Army Fraction manifesto
(terror as a means to making the State revealing its true nature as a
authoritarian police mechanism).  Personally I doubt this as a particularly
viable long term strategy; right wing governments tend to drag large sections
of the population ('swinging voters' and the like) even further to the right,
with the social-democrat opposition trailing along after them, watering down
their policies even further than they do in power. Better in my opinion to drag
a consistently limp social-democrat government kicking and screaming to the
left, than expecting personal-taste fascists, big-money libertarians,
gun-toting god-fearing anti-commies and their fellow travellers to radicalise
the population for you.  -- Scot Mcphee. 


----

circulating a much nastier open letter, denouncing Nader's "wrecking-ball
campaign--one that betrays the very liberal and progressive values it claims to
uphold." 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 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, Calif., 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 anesthetizer, I'd
rather have a provocateur. It would mobilize 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, Wis., 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 Sen. Paul
Wellstone of Minnesota, Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, and Rep. Henry Waxman of
California. "I hate to use military analogies," Nader said, "but this is war on
the two parties."

Hitler analogies always lead to trouble, but the one here is irresistible,
since Nader is actually making the argument of the German Communist Party circa
1932, which helped bring the Nazis to power. I'm not comparing the Republicans
to fascists, or the Greens to Stalinists for that matter. But Nader and his
supporters are emulating a disturbing, familiar pattern of sectarian idiocy.
You hear these echoes whenever Nader criticizes Bush half-heartedly then
becomes enthusiastic and animated blasting the Green version of the "social
fascists"--Bill Clinton, Gore, and moderate environmentalists. It's clear that
the people he really despises are those who half agree with him. To Nader, it
is liberal meliorists, not right-wing conservatives, who are the true enemies
of his effort to build a "genuine" progressive movement. He does have a
preference between Republicans and Democrats, and it's for the party that he
thinks will inflict maximum damage on the environment, civil rights, labor
rights, and so on. By assisting his class enemy, Nader thinks he can help the
wool from the eyes of a sheeplike public.

If Nader's goal were actually progressive reform--a ban on soft money, a higher
minimum wage, health-care coverage for some of the uninsured, a global warming
treaty--it would be possible to say that his strategy was breathtakingly
stupid. But Nader's goal is not progressive reform; it's a transformation in
human consciousness. His Green Party will not flourish under Democratic
presidents who lull the country into a sense of complacency by making things
moderately better. If it is to thrive, it needs villainous, right-wing
Republicans who will make things worse. Like Pat Buchanan, Nader understands
that his movement thrives on misery. But the comparison is actually unfair to
Buchanan (words I never thought I'd write), because Buchanan doesn't work to
create more misery for the sake of making his movement grow the way Nader does.