Near the end of An Unreasonable Man, a sympathetic but
not uncritical documentary portrait of Ralph Nader by a former
protege, Henriette Mantel, and Steve Skrovan, the film’s subject
allows himself the bitter pleasure of joining his fellow
left-wingers in what has now become the cliche of wondering if
George W. Bush is “the worst president ever.” Until then, Mr.
Nader’s stubborn refusal to take responsibility for Mr Bush’s
election in 2000 by splitting the progressive vote had made perfect
sense. For if you accept the Naderite view that the two major
parties are increasingly indistinguishable, then the value of his
offering the electorate a real choice must far outweigh any trivial
differences there might have been between a Gore and a Bush
presidency. But now here was the man himself telling us that, in
effect, the barbs of his Democratic critics — whose hatred and
vitriol directed at him appear here at times to be even greater
than the same directed at the President — were justified all
along.
For if the Bush presidency is as bad as he says it is, doesn’t
that mean that there are important differences between the
parties? How can he go on justifying his failure to back the
Democrats — if not Mr. Gore, since he was then ignorant of how bad
Mr. Bush would be, then at least John Kerry in 2004? The critics
would say, as some of them do in this film, that the reason was
pure personal vanity. I don’t believe this. Everything we see of
Ralph Nader the crusading “public citizen” and consumer advocate in
the 30-odd years before 2000 which occupy most of An
Unreasonable Man suggests that vanity and merely personal
ambition are not among his flaws of character, if any such flaws
there be.
But it is also true that he himself could be regarded as the
progenitor of his critics, and not only because many of them got
their start in politics as “Nader’s Raiders” in the 1970s and '80s.
For they, like their mentor, are creatures of the same1960s-era
belief in politics as a struggle between the forces of light and
darkness — the same belief which now casts Mr. Nader himself as
Prince of Darkness. There is a kind of poetic justice, then, in the
spectacle of so many former disciples turning their hatred on him.
You begin by making a devil of General Motors and you end by being
made a devil of yourself.
Yet Mr. Nader had and has an important point to make about the
ill-consequences which have ensued from politics’ becoming a branch
of marketing, and An Unreasonable Man does a good job of
letting it emerge. Ms. Mantel and Mr. Skrovan trace the change to
the influence of Tony Coelho on the Democrats in the 1980s, when
the party of the little guy learned how to go after the big
corporate contributors whose benefactions had hitherto gone mostly
to Republicans. I think they could have looked a lot further back
than that, but the point remains that when politics becomes an
attempt to win market-share, the two major parties have to come
ever closer together to fight for the same few swing voters in the
middle. As a result, political “debates” — including the Bush-Gore
debates in 2000 whose exclusion of Mr. Nader is the subject of some
of the most interesting passages in the film — are reduced to
dueling platitudes.
Moreover, the shrinking of substantive differences between the
parties means that trivial and personal ones become exaggerated.
Making a market for your political product cannot be done by
changing what has been carefully designed to appeal to the maximum
number, so it must be done by attempting to create incidental
differences in contemptible ways — that is, by vicious attacks on
an opponent’s character and fitness for office rather than his
policies. We’ve seen this brought to a new height in the last two
elections, which the Democrats have sought to make turn on
President Bush’s personal shortcomings — perhaps as payback for
the Republicans’ doing the same to Bill Clinton.
Yet it means that, without any coherent policy of their own on
the Iraq war, they have treated the main foreign policy issue of
the day as nothing but a source of examples of the President’s
“lies,” incompetence, or stupidity. Thus when, in 2004, John Kerry
was asked what he would do differently about Iraq, his answer was:
“Everything!” The scandal of the fact that such a ludicrous evasion
can now pass for political seriousness is exactly what the
candidacy of Ralph Nader should have pointed up. But though he has
been admirably forthright about the war himself, he also changes
the subject by indulging in what Mr. Clinton once called “the
politics of personal destruction” when it suits him to do so.
Probably, he cannot do otherwise. This, after all, is the man
who went after the meat-packing industry by calling hot dogs
“missiles of death.” It’s not exactly his fault that such hyperbole
has now become the common political currency, but neither is it
entirely inappropriate that he has become its victim.
James Bowman is a resident scholar at the Ethics and
Public Policy Center, media essayist for the New
Criterion, and The American Spectator’s movie critic.
He is the author of the new book, Honor: A History (Encounter
Books).
