After paying my $20 admission, I joined the swarms of people ascending the
escalator at Madison Square Garden and took my seat. The overhead giant TV
screens were running videos of youthful protestors in Seattle being
cornered by nasty-looking cops--not the typical fare for a "liberal"
presidential campaign.
At 5 minutes to 8pm emcee Phil Donohue took the podium. The fact that the
rally started *early* was symptomatic of the well-oiled professionalism of
the whole event, facilitated no doubt by the heavy involvement of media
professionals like Donohue, who was the very first afternoon TV talk show
host in the USA. People like this understand how to run things on a tight
schedule. I wish the Marxist left would learn from them.
I like Donohue. Along with people like Ed Asner and Norman Lear (creator of
"All in the Family", the Archie Bunker show), Donohue struggled--usually in
vain--to preserve a liberal voice on network television. Since the decline
of the 1960s radicalization and the increase of media monopoly, there is
virtually no challenge to mainstream opinion on the television networks.
Donohue drew attention to this in his introductory remarks. He said that 20
years ago the law prevented a corporation from owning more than 5 radio
stations. After that law was repealed a few years ago, the trend toward
monopolization has been irresistible. Today one company owns 800 radio
stations. He said that the media itself will not draw attention to its own
excesses, nor will it talk about other issues that Nader has prioritized.
These included inadequate health care and insurance, campaign financing
and--most interestingly--the "war on drugs."
As it turned out, the Nader campaign's objection to the current Draconian
drug laws ran like a red thread throughout the entire evening. It was a way
to address racism, since most of the people busted for drug violations are
blacks and other minorities who were victimized by "profiling." It also
spoke to the life-style, if not libertarian, concerns of a mostly youthful
audience that resented laws against marijuana. Speaking of the composition
of the audience, the sell-out crowd of 15,000 appeared to be at least 98
percent white and youthful. It reminded me a lot of the kind of people who
showed up at the antiwar demonstrations I and other hard-core
revolutionaries organized in the 1960s--committed enough to show up, but
probably not committed enough to join a radical group.
The next part of the rally consisted of big name actors and musicians
paying tribute to Ralph Nader. I found Bill Murray's remarks the most
moving. Murray became famous as a performer on the cutting-edge Saturday
Night Live in the 1960s (tamed by television executives long ago) and then
went on to a successful movie career. Murray talked about the importance of
the Vietnam antiwar movement to him in the 1960s and how he hoped that the
Nader campaign could inspire a similar movement.
The musicians were fabulous: Ani DeFranco, Ben Harper, Eddie Vedder, and
most of all Patti Smith who sang "Over the Rainbow" as a token of the hopes
that today's Green Party could build a wonderful Emerald City of its own.
After such a great buildup, Nader's speech was a bit anticlimactic. Nader
has a rather wooden delivery that emphasizes highly detailed--if not
statistical--indictments of social injustice in the United States. Despite
this, the mostly youthful audience ate it up. The explanation for this is
simple. Nader evokes your favorite high school civics teacher. In his
appeals to returning the United States to a more democratic and more just
society, he would seem to tap into the innocence of young students who need
an established figure as an alternative to the greed and corruption they
see all around them.
For me the most impressive part of Nader's hour-long speech was the
extended salute to the USA's social and political mass movements. He hailed
the abolitionists, the populist farmer revolt, the CIO, the suffragists,
the modern woman's movement, the civil rights movement, the anti-nuclear
movement as ways in which the true creativity and morality of the American
people can be expressed. One movement--alas--that he did not salute was the
Vietnam antiwar movement. And that was no accident.
During the entire rally, there was hardly any analysis or critique of US
foreign policy today. It was shocking in light of the day's headlines, with
the threat of war in the Middle East. I would analyze this refusal to
discuss foreign policy as a function of two separate but related dynamics.
First of all, Nader has gone through life as a reformer of injustices
within the United States. His formidable talents are focused laser-like on
issues such as consumer safety, environmental degradation, campaign
financing, etc. Although he has fought the good fight, it is simply
inadequate for a major progressive election campaign to pretend that the
rest of the world does not exist at least from the standpoint of US
military and diplomatic policies. It is one thing to attack
"globalization", it is another thing to state that perhaps US destroyers
are being blown up because the US military does not have the right to turn
the Persian Gulf into an American lake.
This ties into a concern that first appeared in the pages of the Nation,
when Michael Moore, who introduced Nader to the Garden audience, excoriated
the American left for worrying about exotic causes like Mumia or
interventions overseas when the average American worker cares more about
adequate health care or runaway shops. This basically conservative
adaptation to the moods of the US working class was also reflected in a
talk at a big rally at Columbia University a few years ago co-sponsored by
the AFL-CIO and important left academic figures . Richard Rorty, a
neo-pragmatist, scolded the 1960s left for making the Vietnam war such a
big issue. By doing this, it alienated blue collar workers who might have
been won to a progressive agenda if not for the inflammatory antiwar
demonstrations. Needless to say, this is a wretched analysis and one that I
hope does not become institutionalized in future Green Party election
campaigns.
Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/
