Harold Meyerson - Round One

Harold Meyerson
Round One - November 1, 2000

At first glance, the choice before the voters in this year's election may seem closer in importance to the election of 1820, when James Monroe ran unopposed, than the election of 1860, when Abraham Lincoln's victory plunged the nation into civil war. The country is at peace, with no remotely serious military threats on the horizon, and is enjoying a period of prosperity that has lasted longer and reached more people than any in our history. So if the contest between the Veep and the W has failed to capture the nation's imagination, the reason has to do not only with the candidates, but with a pervasive lack of alarm about America's future: No matter who's elected, really, how bad can things get?

Which is to say: the campaign waged by George W. Bush has been a terrific success, since he has managed to conceal the fact that beneath all that compassion there bubbles a radical-right agenda that would profoundly alter the nation's course. What Al Gore is proposing is basically what Democrats have proposed since the thirties: an incremental increase in social provision (though his proposals are more generous than those of recent election campaigns because of the size of the projected budget surplus). Gore is, broadly, a candidate of continuity. W is anything but.

What Bush is proposing, in fact, surpasses anything that Ronald Reagan and Maggie Thatcher even dared to suggest. At the center of his platform are proposals to privatize a portion of Social Security and to convert Medicare into a program where the government provides seniors with just enough money to get coverage from no-frills HMOs. The change in Social Security is really an assault on both the reality and the idea of a common, national responsibility to alleviate poverty among seniors (who, before Social Security, were our poorest age group). The Medicare proposal codifies and worsens what is already a growing disparity in the health care available to seniors. Both proposals are assaults on the underlying assumptions and enduring successes of the New Deal, ratcheting us back toward a laissez-faire order whose credo is: You're on your own, bub.

And the conservatives know this. It's why National Review and the right-wing think tanks and the Wall Street Journal editorialists are Bushmen every one; they know this compassion stuff is a crock. The NRA and the Christian Coalition share a similar proprietary interest in W, and have maintained a disciplined silence to brighten their boy's prospects. Ever since Ralph Reed signed on to the Bush campaign and told his conservative compadres to hold their tongues, it's been clear that W could call for collective farms and no one on the right would bat an eye.

None of this gainsays the fact that there are a raft of issues where, as George Wallace used to say, "there ain't a dime's worth of difference" between the candidates. Both support major increases in military spending even though we face no conceivable enemy that could better be countered by an increase or upgrade of our conventional forces. Both have favored globalization on the terms laid down by the financial and corporate communities (though Gore has promised unions that he'll tweak that policy if he's elected). And for progressives, there's no question that Gore personifies a Democratic Party that has grown far too comfortable with the values of capitalism at the very moment that those values threaten to eclipse all others.

So -- should progressives vote for Ralph Nader even though their vote may contribute to the Bush Fratboy Restoration and all that it entails? I think any honest Nader voter has to concede that a vote for Ralph in a state where the race is close may come at a cost, and it's not only the long-term threat to our piddling welfare state. Under a Bush presidency, for instance, there will be absolutely no hike in the minimum wage, while Gore plainly favors such an increase. To cast a vote that could well inflict this kind of avoidable hardship on the poorest Americans, there had better be a damn good reason.

That reason, the Naderites say, is that they are committed to building a new, progressive coalition, a project that would take off only if Nader can pull 5 percent of the vote next week and thus qualify the Greens for federal funds in the next election. But how would a Green Party actually function on the left? Nader has addressed this question in detail only once, in an interview with David Moberg in the October 30 issue of In These Times. "There's an overriding goal here, and that's to build a majority party," he begins. "I hate to use military analogies, but this is war.... After November, we're going to go after the Congress in a very detailed way, district by district. If [Democrats in particular districts] are winning 51 to 49 percent, we're going to go in and beat them with Green votes. They've got to lose people, whether good or bad." Even progressives like Paul Wellstone and Russ Feingold would not be exempted, he says. "That's the burden they're going to have to bear for letting their party go astray. It's too bad."

Is it ever! This is a sure-fire plan to get rid of the only figures in American politics who both share the Greens' beliefs and can win elections. And to what end? Nowhere on earth have the Greens won more than roughly 10 percent of the vote in national elections -- which does entitle them to parliamentary representation in nations with proportional representation. In the U.S., with its winner-take-all electoral system, the sole possible effect of running against the all-too-few Wellstones and Feingolds of this world will be to replace them with Republicans.

This is the long-term strategy that makes suffering through a Bush presidency all worthwhile?

The problem with the Nader candidacy is that it lacks a plausible rationale. Which is why the clear choice for progressives in this election is to vote for Al Gore.

What do you think? Join the debate in a special conference of Post & Riposte. We'll highlight selected readers' remarks as the Roundtable progresses.

Harold Meyerson is the executive editor of L.A. Weekly, a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and a member of the editorial board of Dissent.