Doug Henwood's Kerry Endorsement

 

Posted to www.marxmail.org on May 10, 2004

 

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 USA that regards George W. Bush as evil incarnate. Of course, whatever the failings of Ralph Nader real or perceived, they do not justify voting for the most reactionary Democratic Party candidate in over a century.

 

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 (Tennessee) and in Clinton's (Arkansas), he would have become president. When a candidate cannot line up votes in a state that he has represented in the Senate for more than a decade, you can't blame this on Ralph Nader.

 

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 USA will propel the growth of independent class action here, both within and outside the electoral arena. I strongly suspect that the same people huckstering for Kerry today will find excuses in the future to stick with the lesser evil.

 

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 USA to become "leaner and meaner". With the introduction of China into the picture, the looming energy crisis and other deep-seated structural problems, it is *necessary* for the US ruling class to choose candidates that will attack the class interests of working people and to embark on imperialist adventures overseas to secure cheap commodities and lucrative markets. From now until the final showdown with this ruling class, you can be guaranteed that the Republican Party candidate for president will be somebody like George W. Bush or worse and not somebody like Nelson Rockefeller or some other centrist. By the same token, the Democrats will offer up some deficit hawk who is for a more "effective" US presence overseas. If the radical movement can't find a way to break out of this impasse, it will go the way of another movement that faced a similar situation--namely the German left of the Weimar Republic.