Speaking Lies to Power

Ralph Nader fudges the truth just like a real politician.

Matt Welch from the May 2002 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

What do Nader supporters agree on? Almost all share his anti-corporate ideology, most are reflexive critics of American foreign policy, and many harbor the conceit of considering themselves part of the brave minority courageous enough to voice "dissent." When talk about global issues gets too specific, they're more than happy to defer to Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, and Howard Zinn, each of whom Nader singles out for praise in the book. Taken together, it is an intellectual feedback loop, and feedback loops make for slippery footing when the hammer of history crashes down.

That is what happened on September 11. And the reactions from the Naderite left were disastrous.

In the first days, anti-globalization protesters made new signs and became the anti-war movement without missing a beat. The Seattle Coalition's chaotic mouthpiece, Indymedia.org, ran articles calling the Pentagon victims "war criminals." Chomsky, in his first published paragraph after September 11, compared the attack to a previous U.S. bombing of a Sudanese pharmaceutical factory. Said complained of "people flinging about words like 'terrorism' and 'freedom,'" terms he considers "large abstractions [that] have mostly hidden sordid material interests." Zinn suggested the U.S. will never be truly safe from terrorism until it adopts universal health care. An Ohio Green, Jim Klosterman, wrote -- on September 11 -- that "the United States' foreign policy with Israel and the military aid to them may be the [ex]acerbating fact that lead [sic] to the sad events." Bogus statistics about dead Iraqi babies competed for space with aggrieved rants about Henry Kissinger. While warm bodies were still being pulled from the World Trade Center rubble, a bruised nation was receiving earfuls from its "dissidents" about how the U.S. was finally getting a taste of its own medicine. Those who took note of the rhetorical onslaught might never forget.

Nader, wisely, kept a very low profile at first, declining to be interviewed and discouraging public questions about September 11. As far as I can tell, his first published column after the attacks didn't appear until late October; it was about nuclear plant safety. His first major speech on the topic, on October 11, reiterated his "workers and peasants" formulation, asserted that "we're not going to be able to bomb our way to justice," and warned, "How many hundreds of thousands of Afghanis are going to die or starve to death or be sick to death because they don't have medicines as a result of this destruction?" During his book tour, he's been repeating a line about "burning down a haystack in order to look for a needle -- and they still haven't found the needle." When asked by interviewers what he would have done in lieu of bombing, he speaks of invoking "the doctrine of hot pursuit" using "spies, bribes, and commandos." And then the conversations quickly move on to "wartime profiteers" and cockpit safety regulations.

September 11 showed that when it comes to foreign policy and critical thinking, the Naderite left is not yet ready for prime time. Which is a shame, because the consumer advocate and his followers have many useful things to say about corporate welfare, third-party access, political hypocrisy, civil liberties, drug legalization, and a host of other issues the Democrats and Republicans largely ignore. And for all its excesses, the leftist foreign policy critique about supporting dictators and addressing "root causes" has found new resonance in the past months. Nader is clearly licking his chops at the Enron collapse, and all signs point to an even more vigorous run for the presidency in 2004.

But you can't launch a convincing "purity" campaign if you don't respect the facts. When the filmmaker Michael Moore introduced Nader at campaign rallies, he was fond of saying that the candidate was "ready to rock this nation with the truth!" Since September 11, that's been about backwards: The nation has shown it is more than ready to rock Michael Moore and his pals with its very own version of "the truth." Ralph Nader needs to learn that there are people who care as much about the issues as he, yet honestly arrive at very different conclusions. He needs to stop judging people's virtue by whether they support him for president. And unless he wants to become the same kind of politician he claims to despise, he needs to stop treating facts like pastries in a buffet line.

"Politics, as it is practiced, is the art of having it both ways," he writes, with some disgust, on page 8. A year into the Bush presidency he helped deliver, Ralph Nader looks very much like he's practicing politics.