The current conventional wisdom coming from the media pundits about the Nader candidacy is that he must be expressing some degree of vanity that blinds him to the consequences of his Presidential candidacy. What this punditry misses is the historical role of alternative political movements in the US.
The rule of thumb is that an alternative political movement or third party can influence the position of the major party that's its closest ideological neighbor only by playing a spoiler role that costs the major a win in two successive election cycles. What Nader is doing is entirely rational from the perspective of a minor political movement that seeks to have significant influence on the political process. Of course he has little chance of winning an election, or even gaining a significant number of votes. What he can do is influence the platform of the Democrats in 2008 and beyond. This is good news for Republicans, and bad news for the Democrats, at least in the short term. Ultimately, however, he will have to convince a significant number of voters in some key states to vote for him in spite of the fact that by doing so they will probably deprive the Democrats of victory. Are people willing to be that strategic in their voting behavior? The logic of "winner takes all" that governs a two-party system like ours suggests that this is, at best, an uphill fight.
In the long term, if the policies pursued by the Naderites were, in fact, really progressive and appropriate it would all be to the benefit of the electorate and the political system. But in this case I don't think there's anything particularly new or refreshing about the Nader positions (except, possibly, for primary and secondary education), so it's something of a wasted effort. If the Democrats moved in the direction of some of these auld tyred policy prescriptions in 2008 they'd probably be less electable than they are now. It's not that we don't need change. It's that we've already been down this road.
Posted by Demosophist at February 23, 2004 02:20 PM | TrackBackYou may be right about Nader's strategy, but he's not counting on strategic voters – he's counting on voters that don't exist.
I truly do not understand the conviction that the root cause of voter non-participation is the insufficient leftness of all available candidates, or that the solution to the rightward drift of the country is to move the Democratic party farther away from the center – especially considering that the third party efforts that have gotten the most votes have come from the right: Wallace and Perot. Don't these people know anyone outside their own class?
It's not that there's nothing new or refreshing about Nader's positions, but that he's so consistently wrong on them. Either he misunderstands the problems, or his solutions are bad ideas that can't or won't work, or all of the above. He can't possibly be serious about this ... but he is.