Chopping Ralph Nader Down to Size

People love to put their "heros" on pedestals. But all "big men" have feet of clay. It's in the job description (as in, "power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely").

Here's an excellent blog posting by Doug Henwood that points out Ralph Nader's feet of clay:

I’ve long been struck by Ralph Nader’s imperious view of politics—his preference for progressive change via litigation, not legislation, and a career (during which he accomplished many very good things, don’t get me wrong) capped by a few celebrity presidential campaigns in which he never made any effort to build a movement out of the crowds and publicity they generated. So now he’s out with a “novel” that apparently argues that a small posse of enlightened plutocrats will save us. Citizens’ groups aren’t up to the task, Ralph tells Amy Goodman. Only enlightened businesspeople, working from inside (with the assistance of a perky parrot), can.

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So the problem isn’t private ownership and a competitive system driven by profit maximization—it’s simply scale (small good, big bad) and temperament (replace the evil bizpeople with the good ones). He seems to have no idea that competition and profit maximization make people, who may be perfectly warm and lovely in their private lives, do monstrous things. I once heard a very similar line from Ben “Ben & Jerry’s” Cohen, who couldn’t understand how CEOs could both go to church and be nice to their families and then go to work and exploit and pollute.

Of course, as Liza Featherstone pointed out long ago, when faced with a union organizing campaign in crunchy Vermont, B&J fought it as roughly as any thuggish Southern mill owner would. “It’s business, man!,” as Liza’s title explained. Oh, and Ralph did pretty much the same thing when faced with organizing campaigns in a couple of his own shops, Multinational Monitor and Public Citizen. He fired the troublemaking editor of MM, Tim Shorrock, and spread nasty rumors about him, which led Shorrock to this conclusion about Nader:

Ralph Nader may look like a democrat, smell like a populist, and sound like a socialist – but deep down he’s a frightened, petit bourgeois moralizer without a political compass, more concerned with his image than the movement he claims to lead: in short, an opportunist, a liberal hack. And a scab.

And now he’s fully out of the closet as an admirer of the nice sort of plutocrat.

I was never a fan of Ralph Nader. I liked the idea of going against the corporations for the evil they do. But there was alway a "holier than thou" aura around Ralph Nader that bothered me. I'm a down-in-the-dirt democrat. I accept that people are imperfect. I think we are all in this together. But Nader was always an elitist.

Doug Henwood is an interesting fellow. His writing are always worth reading.