Doug Henwood's Kerry Endorsement
Posted to www.marxmail.org on
Although Kerry endorsements from the radical movement have
slowed down to a trickle, you can still find them. Right on the heels of Jeff
Cohen's Commondreams piece, we now have Doug Henwood's article titled
"Ralph 'n' stuff" in the latest Left Business Observer. In
line with Cohen's offering, it consists mostly of attacks on Nader rather than
a defense of Kerry, whom Henwood describes as a candidate requiring "a
giant clothespin to enter a polling booth" on behalf of.
The criticisms fall into two categories. First, Nader is
described as a kind of freebooter who uses the Green Party to advance his own
personal ambitions every four years, but who is not committed to building
permanent institutions based on popular power. Second, he attacks Nader's
record both as a candidate and in his capacity as a "public citizen".
Despite an obvious bias, Henwood's criticisms will have some impact on a left
in the
According to Henwood, Nader has a "deep conservative
streak". Proof of this is the fact that he wrote an article attacking
federally funded public housing in a libertarian journal called "The
Freeman" in 1962. This supposedly was one of his first published articles.
In fact Nader had an article that appeared in the 1959 American Socialist,
co-edited by Bert Cochran and Harry Braverman. It was an attack on the failings
of American democracy in the electoral arena and called for legislative changes
that would make it easier for 3rd parties to gain recognition. I invite the
reader to figure out which article is more representative of Ralph Nader. (I
might track down the article on public housing in order to see what Nader
actually said, although I myself had said some pretty silly things 42 years
ago.)
Henwood groups Nader with the Christian right and Bill
Bennett because he supposedly "seems to lack a libido" and holds in
contempt those who like theirs and consider them politically important. If
Kerry is preferable to Nader on this score, evidently Henwood does not consider
the rights of gay people "politically important". On his website,
Nader states "that the only way to ensure full equal rights is to
recognize same-sex marriage." By contrast, Kerry supports amending the
Massachusetts Constitution to ban gay marriage. Go figure.
Another proof of Nader's conservative streak is that he
favors litigation against corporations rather than government regulation.
Apparently, according to Henwood, if you are not into government regulation,
you betray an "individualist" approach rather than "collective
political action". Somehow, this kind of litmus test seems rather
one-sidedly applied. If government regulation is a good thing, then how can one
vote for Kerry who has bragged openly about being a deficit hawk. If there has
been one thing in the past 20 years that has gutted the power of government
agencies to regulate polluters and other corporate malefactors, it has been
votes to cut the budgets of OSHA, etc. Kerry has voted for every one of these
bills, including the 1993 Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, the largest ever
enacted.
All in all, it is a rather odd yardstick that Henwood
applies to the 3 candidates. By any objective measure, Nader is to the left of
Kerry. But the problem it seems is that he might draw votes from Kerry and help
Bush get elected. Although it might seem rather simple-minded to point this
out, the main obstacle to Kerry getting elected is not Nader but Kerry himself.
Looking back at the 2000 election, if Gore had won in his home state (
Henwood is not happy with the relationship between Nader and
the Greens, who are supposedly getting short shrift from Nader. My reading is
somewhat different. If Nader has held the Greens at arm's length, it is because
some of their leaders have failed to embrace the Nader candidacy early on. By
insisting on a June convention and backing a "safe state" strategy,
the Green Party has effectively reduced the power of the party to mount a
serious challenge to Bush and his Democratic opponent. Although I wouldn't want
to impute a motive, it seems that this might reflect withering under pressure
from the middle-class left that Henwood himself speaks for. In other words, if
Henwood wants to assign a blame for a certain
disengagement between Nader and the Greens, he should look in the mirror.
Henwood holds up the Swedish Social Democracy as an example
for the faltering Green Party. Instead of just running for office, the Swedes
built cooperatives, social clubs, etc. This is about as superficial reading of
the success of the Swedish social democracy as you are going to find. In fact,
the main factor leading to their electoral victory was a general strike led by
miners in 1931 that was commemorated in the great film "Adalen '31". Sooner or later, a social and economic
crisis in the
The reason for this is simple. Since the early 1970s
American capitalism has been following a downward spiral due to irresolvable
contradictions in the world economy. The reemergence of Japanese and German
capitalism on a world scale has generated a need for the