On the last day of the Democratic Party Convention in 1968, Gore Vidal observed to a party grandee that “maybe, the only thing that can save us is a president who isn’t a politician”.
“Who you got in mind?” they asked.
“Ralph Nader,” Vidal said.
By 1969, Nader was a lawyer in his mid-thirties known for his exposé of safety standards in the car industry and for being stalked by General Motors’ private investigators. His meticulous campaigning on behalf of consumers soon got him on the cover of Time, hosting Saturday Night Live, and chatting on Dick Cavett’s talk show about seatbelt design and “stronger passenger compartment shells”. In 2006 he featured in the Atlantic’s 100 most influential people in American history, coming in above Herman Melville, Booker T Washington and Richard Nixon. His entry reads: “He made the cars we drive safer; thirty years later, he made George W Bush the president.”
Nader is the seminal third-party candidate in the US today. He crossed from consumerism to presidential politics as the Green Party candidate in 1996, his first of four bids for the White House. But it was the contest in 2000 that led to the then Senator Joe Biden banishing him from the corridors of the Capitol with the remark: “Nader cost us the election.” To Biden, this was simple maths. The Democratic candidate Al Gore lost Florida by 537 votes; in Florida, Nader got 97,488. Nader’s name still provokes scorn in liberal dining rooms around Washington.
Today, his defence is that Gore should have been a better candidate; the solution is not for anyone who disagrees with the two main parties to exile themselves from electoral democracy. “The Democrats now always look for scapegoats,” he told me over the phone from his home in Washington DC. The Kamala Harris campaign is already blaming the Green Party candidate for a Donald Trump victory, he noted. One of the Democrats’ billboards in the swing states reads: “Jill Stein helped Trump once. Don’t let her do it again.”
“They’re preparing to use this tiny Green Party as a scapegoat if they fail to defeat the worst Republican Party in history,” Nader said. Trump’s GOP is “cruel, mean, power-hungry, imperial, demonstrably anti-worker, anti-children – blocked the child tax extension, for example – anti-women – Trump’s a major misogynist – bigoted against immigrants, and willing to somersault the entire government into a prostrating position before Wall Street. If you can’t landslide a party like that the way FDR and Truman would have, you have to look for scapegoats.”
Nader thinks Harris’s message is “narrow, dull and outrageously repetitive”. More progressive economic policies, such as raising the minimum wage, are key to defeating the Republicans. “Twenty-five million workers make between $7.25 and $15 an hour,” Nader said. “You raise it to 15 bucks an hour, which is low by European standards, and you answer the question of low-wage workers: ‘Why should I vote?’” Nader even has a slogan ready to accompany the policy: “Go vote for a raise – you’ve long earned it.” He continued: “Then they can make it authentic… by actually holding up the bill as they campaign around the country that would be passed in Congress if they win.”
Despite Nader’s scepticism, corporatism is not universal in the Democratic Party: an assertive anti-trust movement has emerged that campaigns against monopolistic companies such as Microsoft and Google. Even though both approaches are often critical of corporations, Nader’s brand of consumerism isn’t as compatible with anti-trust instincts as it might first seem. Anti-trust devotees such as Barry C Lynn have argued that companies can treat workers poorly in the name of keeping prices low for consumers. Nader praises the leading anti-trust icon, the young Federal Trade Commission lawyer Lina Khan, as “very good”. “She’s the best chair since Michael Pertschuk, in 1980, under Carter.” But he is doubtful that the movement can make lasting impact. “The Federal Trade Commission has a budget smaller than a large corporate law firm,” he claimed. “It’s just a tiny little… promising blip on our horizon that can be extinguished by one act of Congress – a corporate Congress.”
Nader is pessimistic about the future. He would not disclose how he plans to vote, but he clearly believes Trump poses the greatest threat. He framed the election as a “competition between [the] fascism of Trump and [the] autocracy of Harris in a two-party duopoly”. (Last year he told the Washington Post: “Autocracy leaves an opening. They don’t suppress votes. They don’t suppress free speech.”)
Prising apart the two-party duopoly has been a defining mission of Nader’s life; it has also led him to some unusual bedfellows. Ross Perot’s centrist Reform Party endorsed Nader in 2004, four years after Donald Trump sought its presidential nomination. In 2015 Nader praised Trump for not ruling out running as a third-party candidate and said he would be a “nightmare of the Republican corporate establishment”.
Robert F Kennedy Junior, who ran against Biden for the Democratic nomination this year before running as an independent, was the US’s most successful third-party candidate in decades. In July he was polling at around 15 per cent. Kennedy, a former environmental lawyer, railed against corporate capture but was waylaid by conspiracies about vaccines. Once Biden quit the race, RFK bled support to Harris, falling to 7 per cent. “He made a lot of political blunders,” Nader said. “He has these conspiratorial cockamamie theories that obscure his former powerful criticism of the drug industry,” adding that he “ended up endorsing Trump, asking for a cabinet position – a sad figure”.
Kennedy attacked the Democratic Party for supporting censorship and foreign interventionism. He framed himself as a fighter against an inscrutable, nefarious establishment. Does Nader think scepticism towards authority, which used to be the preserve of the left, is now more common on the right? “It’s what I call the false populism of generic corporatists. They’ll talk about immigrants taking jobs, and they’ll talk about Democrats [being] out of touch with blue-collar workers. But when push comes to shove, they’re hardcore corporatists.”
“The overall issue here is the supremacy of corporate power over everything,” Nader said. He recalled Franklin D Roosevelt’s letter to Congress in 1938 in which he wrote: “The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism – ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power.” Trump, Nader believes, has provided “tonnes of evidence that he wants to be a dictator”. He pointed to recent comments made by the former chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, Mark Milley, who served under Trump, that his boss was a “fascist”.
Is that a reason to vote for Harris? “Yeah – I mean, unless your relatives are being killed in Palestine and Lebanon, you wouldn’t care about that, and you’d vote for Harris.”
Does he think democracy will survive? “No, of course not.”
Throughout our conversation, the 90-year-old was just as fluent and sharp as he was on Cavett’s television show in the 1970s. He has two books out this year, including a collection of essays, Out of Darkness. Next year, Civic Self-Respect, a handbook for the aspiring good citizen, will be published.
Ralph Nader shows no signs of slowing. But he has already thought about what he wants his legacies to be: “One is that I spent a lot of time talking to reporters and trying to inform them. The second is that one person can make a difference. The third is that gratification in life is enormously nourished by struggling for a more just world. The fourth is that all assent that binds societies together starts by protecting dissent.”
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This article appears in the 07 Nov 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Trump takes America