[Announce-DAN] to all progressives: On Nov. 8th...

["getmelissa@uswest.net" <getmelissa@uswest.net>]

(please forward widely)

Every progressive mind (Gore or Nader or other supporter) should take
some time with this article.  It's a great entry-way to Nov.8th.

-melissa


Published in the November 13, 2000 issue of In These Times 
The Great Debate: Nader Has Inspired Bitter Debates On The Left. Isn't
It
Terrific?
by John Nichols
                                
Leaning across the coach-class aisle of his flight from Washington to
Boston, where 12,000 people would rally to protest his exclusion from
the first presidential debate, Ralph Nader mused, "If I hadn't run, what
would there be for the left to talk about in this election?" 

One need not wear Green colors to acknowledge that the Green Party
nominee
for president makes a good point. Love Nader or hate him, support his
candidacy as an inspired challenge to politics as usual or oppose it as
a vain and dangerous fool's mission, but, please, don't deny the impact
of this campaign on progressives. For the first time in more than 50
years, the left is fully engaged in an intense, issue-driven, tactically
sophisticated dialogue about how to get the most out of the electoral
process. 

In the thick of the debate, especially when Al Gore backers label
Naderites na•ve cogs in a right-wing Republican machine--or when the
Naderites counter by decrying their detractors as na•ve cogs in a
right-wing Democratic machine--the whole endeavor can seem unsettling.
And it is. The dialogue over how to approach this year's presidential
election is shaking up the left, rousing it from a long neglected and
frequently dysfunctional relationship with electoral politics. Where
exactly the Gore-Nader tug-of-war will land the great, ill-defined mass
of progressive voters on the American political landscape remains to be
seen. But there is good reason to believe, whatever the count on
November 7, that the left will end this year in a better place than
where it stood prior to the 2000 campaign. 

There's even the possibility that this discourse will lead American
progressives toward an understanding of the prospects for a politically
savvy electoral strategy that mirrors the sophisticated approach of
European, Indian, Australian, Canadian and Mexican activists. At the
very least, Nader has succeeded in forcing progressives to think anew
about how and why they will cast their ballots this fall. 

Without Nader, the 2000 election campaign would have been the most
dismal
presidential competition for American progressives since Grover
Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison faced off in a 1888 campaign so
hideously devoid of idealism that it spawned the Populist movement. Yes,
in a no-Nader context, the overwhelming majority of progressives would
have cast grudging ballots for Gore. But what would there have been to
say about those votes except perhaps that, once more, in the contest
between voting and not voting, the lessons of fourth-grade civics
teachers won out? And, perhaps, that they kept the smirking Texas
executioner out of the Oval Office.

Now, whether they are planning to vote for Gore or Nader, or whether
they are still agonizing over the choice, progressives are talking about
this election campaign. Endlessly. Energetically. And fruitfully. The
initial success of the Nader candidacy--measured by summer poll results
that put the Greens' strength near 10 percent in several key
states--made real the question of whether it was nobler to cast a ballot
for the best candidate and the better politics that might follow, or to
lend a vote to the inferior candidate with the clearest shot at
defeating the really dangerous contender. "Never in my life have I had
so many discussions with so many people I generally agree with about how
to vote in a November election," says Ed Garvey, a labor lawyer who was
the 1998 Democratic nominee for governor of Wisconsin. "People really
are thinking about where to go this year; they're weighing the choices,
asking themselves where to compromise, where to stand firm." 

Garvey, who like many Democrats is also a longtime Nader admirer, is one
of the people doing the agonizing. He appeared at a huge Madison rally
organized by the Greens and asked the cheering crowd to imagine what a
better nation this would be with Nader as president. After he delivered
his impassioned speech, however, Garvey confided that if the contest
between Gore and Bush remains close in his crucial swing state, he'll
probably cast his ballot for the vice president. "It's hard," Garvey
says. "Do you follow your heart or do you do what you think has to be
done to prevent right-wingers from taking charge of everything?"

Yes, it is hard. The Nader challenge has inspired some of the most
bitter
internal disputes the left has seen in decades. Old "Nader's raiders"
such as former Rep. Toby Moffett (D-Connecticut) are campaigning against
their
mentor. Lifelong Democrats such as former Texas Agriculture Commissioner
Jim Hightower have torn up their membership cards and jumped to the
Greens. Massachusetts Rep. Barney Frank and other Democrats have engaged
in ugly and unwarranted attempts to portray Nader as insensitive to the
concerns of women, gays and lesbians and racial minorities. At the same
time, Greens have tossed brickbats at Gore's pragmatic union supporters,
dismissing them as Democratic Party stooges who would abandon the
Seattle coalition for an empty promise of access to the Oval Office--or
perhaps a night in the Lincoln bedroom. 

So intense has the internal conflict on the left grown that, in Boston
on the night of the first presidential debate, Ironworkers gathered
outside the hall to cheer Gore clashed with students, there to demand
Nader's inclusion. "I don't know if I've ever seen so many people who
agree on so many issues so divided over a single election," says Mel
King, a former Democratic legislator who ran a "Rainbow Coalition" race
for mayor of Boston and now is campaigning for Nader. "People are more
worked up about Nader-versus-Gore than anything in years." 

Terrible, terrible, terrible gripe the cautious minders of an almost
always too-cautious left. They worry about "wasted" energy and "wasted"
votes. They fret about the damage the dissing discourse will do to a
broad constituency that, when it disagrees, in the words of New Party
founder Joel Rogers, can mirror the worst excesses of "hungry people
fighting over food." 

But I see nothing terrible in this discourse. On the contrary, I think
it's terrific.

Nader's challenge has demanded that progressives take electoral politics
as seriously as do their comrades in other lands--and, perhaps more
importantly, as seriously as do their domestic foes on the corporate and
religious right. Finally, progressives are asking the right question:
How do I use my vote, my energy, my talent, my influence, my resources
to achieve the most left-wing result possible? 

That the answers will differ is not merely understandable but necessary.
To achieve the most left-wing result that is possible in Kansas, for
instance, may require progressive populists to cast their ballots in
Republican primaries for moderate state school board candidates--if only
because they want their children to be taught evolution. To achieve the
most left-wing result that is possible in this year's New York Senate
race, trade unionists from Buffalo to the Bronx will eschew the
Democratic line and cast their ballots for Hillary Clinton on the line
of the Working Families Party--theorizing that because New York allows
the fusion of votes from different parties, Clinton will read the
results and know that she could not have won without the votes of people
who object to the Democratic Party's rightward drift. To achieve the
most left-wing result that is possible in several Vermont state
legislative districts
this fall, local activists will cast their ballots for candidates of the
newly chartered Vermont Progressive Party--which should win more seats
in a state legislature this year than any left party since the Minnesota
Farmer-Labor and Wisconsin Progressive parties folded their third-party
efforts in the '40s. 

And what of the presidential race? Again, the pursuit of that most
left-wing result will take voters in myriad directions. In the District
of Columbia, where a Democratic victory is only slightly less certain
than that of the Assads in Damascus, progressives will cast their
ballots for Nader--in hopes that the D.C. Statehood/Green Party alliance
will displace the Republicans as Washington's No. 2 party. In Alaska,
where Gore is about as competitive as, well, Nader, progressives will
take a serious shot at pushing the Greens into second place.

In other states, it gets harder. But, for those who would like to see
the left become a more serious player in American electoral politics,
hard is good. If we recognize that it is unlikely either the Democrats
or the Greens are going away after November 7, then the task of
determining the issues and the circumstances that might lead a voter to
break with the Democrats--or to stick with them--is healthy for
progressives who have been on the losing end of a dysfunctional
relationship with the Democratic Party pretty much since the day FDR
died.

For the first time in decades, the term "tactical voting" is being given
its proper place in the language of the American left. Progressive
voters are actually checking poll figures, not to figure out which of
the evils is ahead, but rather to determine whether they can safely cast
a ballot for the good. These are people who would not risk handing the
White House to Bush, but who hope to be able to cast a Green vote as a
warning to Gore and Democratic Party leaders that there is indeed a
constituency that stands to the left of the Democratic Leadership
Council. 

The point at which any particular progressive voter decides to embrace
or
abandon the lesser evil is not the point. What matters is that the Nader
candidacy has opened dialogues--both internal and external--about the
wisdom and potential for tactical voting. This, as they say in China and
at Billy Bragg concerts, is a great leap forward.

If there is a single constant in left electoral work internationally, it
is an understanding of the value and the power of tactical voting.
Indeed, before the 1997 British election that dispatched the
Conservative Party from power after 18 years of Margaret Thatcher and
John Major, the watchword of the left was "tactical." The week before
the election, Britain's New Statesman magazine published a chart
suggesting the best vote that its lefty readers could cast in each of
more than 600 local contests for Parliament. The strategy involved
backing the strongest contenders against the Conservatives from a list
that included candidates of Labor and the smaller Liberal Democrat,
Welsh and Scottish nationalist parties. The strategy worked--not only
were the Tories defeated, but voters elected the largest Labor and
Liberal Democrat blocs since the end of World War II. 

In more recent European Parliament elections, the tactical approach has
expanded to include instructions to vote for Greens and left-wing
offshoots of the Labor Party, with considerable success. In the recent
London mayoral election, which put Labor renegade Ken Livingstone in the
mayor's chair and Greens in a number of key positions, tactical voting
was raised to something of an art form by creative new coalitions of
traditional Labor voters, Greens and independent leftists.

In France, where a two-tier election system makes it possible to cast a
first vote based on ideology and a second vote for practicality,
leftists for generations have used tactical voting as a tool to pressure
the Socialist Party to move left. In the last rounds of presidential and
parliamentary elections, for instance, the millions of first-round votes
for Green, Communist and Trotskyist candidates--yes, Trotskyists
actually do top the million-vote mark in France--clearly signaled to the
Socialists that they needed to move left. And they did, implementing a
35-hour work week and challenging the cautious "third-way" philosophy
advanced by Britain's Tony Blair and Germany's Gerhard Schršder.

Similar stories of strategic alliances, careful plotting and--dare we
say
it?--success can be found around the world. Such tales are especially
common in Scandinavia, where Social Democratic and purer "Third Left"
parties compare, contrast, compete and, at times, come together--as in
Finland, where the Left Alliance Party, which could reasonably be
referred to as "Naderite," recently entered the government as a junior
coalition partner. 

Of course, tactical voting is only one hammer that can be extracted from
the toolbox of electoral strategies that could be employed by
progressives who are determined to alter the political
landscape--internationally and domestically. The variety of approaches
is actually rather well illustrated by the tentative, yet clearly
hopeful steps taken this year by New York's Working Families Party as it
makes real the promise of fusion, Vermont's Progressive Party as it
forges a genuine third force, and the Greens, who have chosen not to run
candidates against progressive Democrats while at the same time mounting
needed races against New Democrats such as California Sen. Dianne
Feinstein--who faces a
spirited challenge from Global Exchange's Medea Benjamin. 

Is it possible that the American left might eventually develop the
structures, institutions and--most critically--the instincts required to
move in and out of the Democratic Party, to cast tactical votes, build
complex alliances and, ultimately, create an alternative politics that
is bigger than the Democratic Party, or even the Green Party? Can the
rare accomplishment of Vermont Rep. Bernie Sanders, who has proved that
it is possible to force the Democrats to play nice with an independent
socialist, be replicated in states where voters outnumber dairy cows?

It is easy to suggest that America's absurd and constricting
winner-take-all electoral system renders comparison with other countries
useless. It is even easier to claim that the American left lacks the
electoral traditions, the organizational strength and the communications
infrastructure that has enabled progressive forces in other lands to
forge effective electoral strategies. It is easiest of all to question
whether there even is a left in America--and to state with puffed-up
certainty that, even if such a team can be identified, its players could
never be expected to agree long enough to take the field of political
battle and make a difference.

Dismissing the left's prospects--electoral or otherwise--is a national
pastime in this country. But I seem to recall that, exactly a year ago,
I heard questions about whether it made any sense to try and pull
together demonstrations outside the Seattle sessions of a trade group
that even some well-read leftists could not identify. Last fall's
anti-WTO protests proved that a diverse coalition of progressives could
take a page from their international allies and mount a powerful
challenge not only to corporate power, but to the naysayers within the
left's own ranks. And the great Nader-Gore debate suggests the
possibility that--far from destroying itself--the broad American left
may finally be prepared to steal a page from the electoral playbook of
its international comrades. 

Sen. Paul Wellstone, the Minnesota Democrat who backs Gore but eschews
criticism of Nader, knows better than perhaps anyone else on the
American left the challenge and the potential of a more engaged and
tactically savvy left politics. Not long ago, I sat with Wellstone in a
room full of progressives who agreed on every issue, but who were almost
evenly divided on the Nader-versus-Gore question. The dialogue between
Wellstone and his friends was thrilling--filled with the intensity,
mutual respect and hope that is so often missing from activist
discussions. 

"I really do believe it's important that Gore beat Bush," Wellstone said
to me as we were walking out of the room. "But I want to tell you
something: It's just as important that we capture the energy of this
dialogue that we've got going on the left and turn it into something.
November 7 is important because it's Election Day, but November 8 may be
even more important for progressives. On November 8, no matter what
happens, we've got to take all these questions and arguments, all this
energy that's being poured into beating Bush with Gore and into building
an alternative with Nader, and turn it into something."

Wellstone is right to see reason for hope in the electoral turbulence
that has gripped the left this fall. Ralph Nader has stirred the pot. He
has forced progressives to begin to come to grips with the question of
how they will engage with the electoral process. And, no matter how they
answer that question, the nature of their engagement will be more
sophisticated, more nuanced and more significant than it has been since
the days when no one questioned whether there was a left in America. 

John Nichols is editorial page editor of the Capital Times in Madison,
Wisconsin. A fellow with The Nation Institute, he writes "The Beat"
column for The Nation and frequently contributes to The Progressive and
In These Times. His new book, written with Robert W. McChesney, is It's
the Media, Stupid! (Seven Stories). 

Copyright 2000 In These Times 

                                                               ###
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