In 2000 the long-standing consumer rights advocate, Ralph Nader, stood as the Green Party’s presidential candidate, featuring on the ballot in most of the 50 states. He garnered around 3% of the popular vote nationwide (though considerably more in several states) and was denounced by many a Democratic Party hack for putting Bush in the White House.
At the time, Nader lacked significant trade union support even at a local level, but enlisted the backing of an impressive array of left-leaning celebrities and academics, and the ISO, the former sister organisation of the British SWP. Four years on Nader is again mounting a presidential campaign of sorts, though this time he is not the candidate of a sharply divided Green Party and the likes of Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon and Howard Zinn have also abandoned his camp. In their stead have come an ever weirder and more unsavoury collection of benefactors and media champions. Among them has been the former Nixon speechwriter turned far-right populist and anti-Semitic demagogue, Pat Buchanan. While stopping short of endorsing Nader he has certainly bestowed praise on a candidate one might have assumed would be his arch opponent.
Perhaps Buchanan’s enthusiasm for Nader has something to do with the latter’s championing of tighter immigration controls, a position which has embarrassed his running-mate, leading Green Party light, Peter Camejo, who has effectively broken with his own organisation’s conference decision to stand as Nader’s vice-presidential candidate. But Nader’s new-found friends and supporters also include more mainstream Republicans who have helped finance his efforts to get on the ballot paper. Overall, some 10 per cent of Nader’s funds appear to have come from Bush backers and in some key states the figure appears to be much higher.
In Florida, where the State Supreme Court has added Nader’s name to the ballot, Glenda Hood, the Secretary of State, and still another unabashed Bush-backer in the cabinet of Dubya’s brother, Jeb, insisted that the Nader candidacy feature on the state’s absentee ballots even before the judges made their ruling. This year, the Democrats have spent an absurd amount of time and money mounting legal challenges to sustain a deeply undemocratic bar against Nader, though their charge that he is little more than a spoiler for the Republicans now has some credence.
Meanwhile, leading lights of the British SWP have continued to lend Nader their not terribly critical support. Alex Callinicos has launched justified salvoes at Kerry and the Democrats but praised the Nader candidacy, while a 25 September editorial in Socialist Worker claims that it points “in the right direction” – no irony intended.
A letter from a long-time SWP member, Nick Grant, which appears in the paper’s 1 October edition is rather more honest and perceptive:
“During a month spent in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York I came across not one public meeting, street stall, poster or leaflet for the Nader campaign. Even though these areas are the liberal heartlands of the US, where he may not have wanted to focus his resources, Nader’s only national presence was in press reports of his legal fights to get on the maximum number of state ballots. On the other hand, there were regular Democratic Party recruitment and registration stalls in shopping areas, music gigs and travel points”.
Crucially, Grant notes that the campaign has had no serious involvement with any of the various coalitions that have emerged to oppose the wars waged by Washington in the wake of 9/11, however critical Nader has sometimes been of Bush’s “war on terrorism”. He also highlights the almost complete absence of visible support among the hundreds of thousands of marchers on the streets of New York during the emphatically anti-war, as well as anti-Bush, 29 August demonstration.
While the Nader campaign may indeed prove a factor in the eventual outcome on 2 November, there are few if any excuses remaining for those like the SWP and its ex-sister group, the ISO, who would like to pretend that a Nader campaign is some kind of short cut to a workers’ party in the United States. Their support for Nader seems still another symptom of an incurable infatuation with populist electoralism that stands in sharp contrast to an earlier tradition within its ranks of outright contempt for vote-catching exercises as such.