In Defense of Ralph Nader
posted
to www.marxmail.org on
Dr. Harry G. Levine,
I had assumed that the author of the VV hatchet-job on Nader was some snot-nosed kid on George Soros's
payroll. I was surprised to discover that it was instead written by a
http://www.soc.qc.edu/Staff/levine/
(My advice, btw, is to trim the hair and beard. You are not 30 any more.)
You have 2 articles on your website, one the VV article with the racist title and a similar one with the alternative title "RALPH NADER AS MAD BOMBER". What's with the bomb obsession, anyhow? If you had allowed yourself just a tad more rhetorical excess, you might have wound up with something like "Ralph Nader, oily Arab, go back where you came from."
I see that you relied on the wretched G. William Domhoff for advice on your articles. This makes perfect sense. 35 years ago he earned some distinction for analyzing American class structure. In more recent years his attention seems to have turned toward the study of dreams and the need to vote for any Democrat, no matter how stinky. These two topics are obviously closely related.
My suggestion to you is to take some Paxil
or something to get rid of this obsession with Ralph Nader.
Furthermore, you should not blame him for Gore's defeat in 2000. My old friend
Peter Camejo told a news conference that over 200,000 registered Democrats in
* * * * *
Dear Joel Kovel,
In your Commondreams attack on the Nader-Camejo campaign, you write:
Thus you will learn,
if you read their unending email postings, that criticism of Nader is a plot engineered by the Democrats, that Kerry is a
greater danger than Bush because he will be more effective, that the notion of
“anybody but Bush” is a sign of cowardice, and that the real problem is not
Bush but “Bushism,” a new word for a phenomenon as
old as G.W. Bush himself, namely, that both mainstream parties share in the crafting
of US imperialism.
It is not exactly clear to me whether you think that this understanding of "Bushism" is correct or not. I myself have not heard this word before, but do subscribe to the view that both parties share an equal responsibility for imperialism.
More to the point, it seems rather misleading to speak in
terms of "imperialism" as a kind of policy that can be crafted. By
contrast, a policy on gay marriage can be crafted. This is something that can
be passed as law as it was in
In terms of politics, it makes very little difference who is elected. On every single imperialist war of the past 100 years at least, support for such wars is a bipartisan affair. For example, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson--3 bona fide liberals--made the decision to commit US troops to imperialist adventures.
Finally, on your observation: "The problem is, however, that a very big difference between Democrats and Republicans has evolved over the past generation or so."
This looks at the problem from only one angle. Not only is
there a big difference between the two parties. There is a big difference
between the Democratic Party of our youth and the DP of Jimmy Carter, the DLC and
Bill Clinton. This party is not only objectively to the right of the traditional
New Deal party and its heirs like LBJ, it is also to the right of the Nixon
presidency. Just as it took a Republican to visit
So what is going on? What drives all these politicians to be so bellicose and to favor the rich? Is the human race coming up with poorer specimens due to fluoride in the water or too much corn syrup in the spaghetti sauce (including Paul Newman's, I was chagrined to discover.)
At the risk of sounding like a member of the Spartacist League, I would have to insist that the push to
the right is driven by the need of the American ruling class to dominate its
competitors. It needed to dismantle the welfare state because it cut into
corporate profits. It needs to invade
If we are to move forward politically, it would have to be
on the basis of opposing the capitalist system and the Democratic-Republican
party in the