Swans
The Case for Nader-Camejo
by Louis Proyect
(Swans - July 19, 2004) Although liberal attacks on Ralph Nader
have been marked by a level of vituperation usually reserved for such
as Slobodan Milosevic, Greg Bates's Ralph's Revolt is completely
rancor-free by contrast. It is a calm, dispassionate "case for joining
Nader's rebellion," as the subtitle puts it.
As founder and publisher of Common Courage Press, Greg Bates
selects works that go against the grain of conventional thinking. They
include Jeffrey St. Clair's "Been Brown So Long" (reviewed on
Swans in March 2004) and numerous titles by Paul Farmer, the
Harvard physician who has dedicated his life to helping AIDS patients
in Haiti. On the Common Courage website, the mission statement
refers to Farmer, who had invited Bates to a ceremony in Boston
where Jean Bertrand Aristide was to give a speech. In explaining to
Farmer why he publishes his books and those of other progressives,
Bates says, "Some ask why we do this work. We ask a different
question: How can we not?"
Throughout Ralph's Revolt, Bates likens Nader to Don Quixote, a
somewhat unflattering comparison if you think solely in terms of tilting
at windmills, etc. However, one must remember that Cervantes chose
Quixote as a vehicle for his own unhappiness with the bourgeois
transformation of Spain. If Don Quixote was a fool to romanticize
Spain's feudal past, at least he had the wisdom to assert "There are
only two families in the world, the Haves and the Have-nots," a
phrase used by Bates as the epigraph for chapter nine of his book.
In that chapter, titled Appease the Bond Market: the Kerry Plan to
Make the Rich Richer, Bates lays out in convincing detail how Kerry
would reinstitute Clintonomics. As a "deficit hawk," Kerry promised
to abandon earlier plans to expand college tuition subsidies and aid to
state government in order to "help the higher priority of halving the
federal deficit in four years." These announcements worried liberal
supporters such as Robert Kuttner of the American Prospect who
shrewdly observed that Kerry was running an election campaign on
the basis of how Clinton governed, rather than the way that he ran for
office. He worried that "No president ever got elected by promising to
appease the bond market." Of course, it makes things a lot easier if
you don't have a gadfly like Ralph Nader calling attention to this in
televised debates.
While Paul Krugman advised his readers in the New York Times on
July 9 that "John Kerry has proposed an ambitious health care plan
that would extend coverage to tens of millions of uninsured
Americans, while reducing premiums for the insured," Bates reminds
us that this does not include a provision for single payer insurance, the
most cost efficient and effective means for insuring access to health
care for all. Instead, tax-payer money will be showered on
corporations to ease the cost of private insurance plans. The May 3rd
Wall Street Journal quotes Kerry: "I would think American business
would jump up and down and welcome what I am offering."
By contrast, votenader.org says: "The Nader Campaign supports a
single-payer health care plan that replaces for-profit, investor-owned
health care and removes the private health insurance industry (full
Medicare for all)."
If Nader's campaign suggests elements of Don Quixote, then Bates
sees George W. Bush in terms of another familiar literary figure from
the same period. "The year 1605, or possibly 1606, saw the creation
of William Shakespeare's Macbeth. There are some parallels between
this assassin and George W. Bush. The one murdered to become
king, while the other stabbed democracy in the back by convincing his
allies on the Supreme Court to anoint him. But, as with the Ralph
Nader/Don Quixote comparison, it is the differences, not the
similarities, that illustrate."
As tempting as it is to understand everything that's gone wrong with
the USA in the past four years as the plot of an evil King (a trope that
was also found in Barbara Garson's Macbird, a send-up of LBJ
during the Vietnam war), the real problem is the lack of a hero to
come to the rescue in the final act. While so many liberals (including
Michael Moore) hope that the Democrats arrive on a white horse to
rescue the American people, the truth is that the Democrats have been
complicit in the right wing drive to make war abroad, deprive us of
decent jobs and curtail civil liberties.
With respect to his ambitions, Bush is not qualitatively different from
previous scary Republican Party presidents, from Richard Nixon to
Ronald Reagan. What he has and what they lacked is control over the
Congress and Judiciary, something that has not occurred since the
1950s. Furthermore, Bush benefits from having a supine Democratic
legislative opposition that has voted for the Patriot
