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Ralph Nader: a 3-Way Debate |
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By Jack Nichols, Thomas Scott Tucker & BuckcuB
After Receiving a Green Party Press Release By Jack Nichols Dear Green Friends:
I'm approving because I hope to see many thousands taking part. I wrote a groundbreaking work on masculinity (published in 1975 by Penguin Books) that was cited quite favorably by former New Options editor Mark Satin in his 1979 book New Age Politics. Mark later made me aware--in 1980 or so-- that my politics and perspectives have always been, essentially, Green...even before Green. On C-Span I watched the Green 2000 convention and felt as if I'd been watching my own kind of people. On the other hand, I'm enough of a pragmatist to see how Nader's entry into Election 2000 was one of the primary reasons that the election in my adopted state, Florida, was thrown to the Bush-Nazis. That's why I'm truly dismayed. I feel as if Nader and the Greens have "done us dirty" and that it appears you're now attempting to look as if you've truly represented a genuine opposition to Bush by showing up in Washington on the 20th. In fact, you helped him greatly to get there. If the Greens had had genuinely strong grass-roots organizations in 2000, or some real hope of winning, actually, Nader's run would have seemed to me to be less a vile crime. In fact, I see Nader as having been a Bush-Nazi collaborator. He should, at the least, have honorably bowed out publicly before November 7. I'd previously always liked what he's stood for, but I can't forgive his egomania now. I hope he goes away forever. I've been thinking somewhat--now that Democratic power-brokers and Republicans alike are burying the hatchet--to put GayToday solidly into the Green column to build a strong third party before 2004 or 2008. I once ran a favorable article on your party. But because of what Nader has done, which has infuriated some of GayToday's best writers, and me too, I don't see how I can go that way. I've long considered myself a neo-anarchist as well--so I suppose I'll just stay in that column as long as I can't do anything but grumble on my inmost interior about Nader's thoughtless and unforgivable betrayal of the welfare of the entire nation/world. I know that there are a goodly number of proud gay Greens. I was a recipient of many of their e-mails in 2000. But many of these only saddened me greatly for their disingenuous excuse-making.
Peace, Let's Talk About Fascism: By Thomas Scott Tucker
Exceptions don't save such a party from amoralism, and liberals dutifully made one pact after another with every "pragmatic" Lucifer imaginable-- if only they could still save their souls by voting for Democrats. Morally and politically, the real deal was signed and sealed by liberals when that first compromise was made with the bipartisan lords of the death chambers. Already up to their gills in blood and mud, liberal Democrats decided to call their predicament a swimming pool party. Come on in, they urged as the votes went down on "welfare reform," the water's fine. Only three officials in the Clinton administration resigned in protest over the bipartisan assault on welfare-- to their everlasting personal credit, but to the everlasting political shame of the Democratic Party. In due course, one of the few Democratic dissenters in Congress during the welfare debates, Senator Paul Wellstone, decided that he'd better not stick his neck out too far. He offered the heads of queers instead to the congressional guillotine, and voted for the Defense of Marriage Act. No wonder liberal Democrats have injected such venom into fellow citizens who dared to vote for Nader. After all, they've been reserving doses of strychnine for eight years and more. Perish the thought that they might bite the hands that have fed them such bipartisan shit and brutality for the past twenty years. These "progressives" concoct the choicest poisons for people who act as if each and every vote should truly count. How many hours in their days and nights have they spent delivering papal bulls and excommunications? Don't they have a clue that some of us were never, ever true believers in their wee kirk? What am I to the Democratic Party, and what is the Democratic Party to me? I am either a hamster taking orders on a partisan treadmill, or I am nothing. That's the message that's been coming through loud and clear on my TV, in the morning papers, in my nightly emails. Consider the ironies-- the Democratic Party, which can't find a spine with map and a flashlight, which absorbs Republican doctrine and drivel like a dry sponge-- this same amorphous entity suddenly operates with Leninist rigor and discipline. And for what purpose? To shout slogans without rhyme or reason with drill team precision, to find political betrayal and even fascist sympathies in every region beyond their own horizon. In the same breath in which they claim each and every vote must be counted, they also claim each and every vote must be counted for the candidate of their own choosing. Jack, I must tell you what I have told dozens, hundreds, thousands of your partisan allies by this time. Your passion impresses me, your political arguments not at all. They are grounded neither in reason nor in history, but only in partisan premises which I do not share. I cannot really respond to your political arguments, strictly speaking, because you have made none so far. You have only quoted salvationist doctrines which may be fine in their own realm-- I remain agnostic.
But the present debate is political. And not political in general, but electoral in particular. We are debating what kind of democracy we do or do not have in the United States, and what kind of candidates do or do not serve democracy best. In that sense, you have already compromised any absolutist anarchist position, which is presumably why you took care to append that "neo." You have further compromised even such neo-anarchism by making what amounts to an intensely partisan argument-- in favor of the Democratic Party and Al Gore. The political issue here isn't whether you "believe" in that party or that candidate, but only whether you would vote for that party and that candidate-- on "pragmatic" grounds, as you claim. Apparently you did so, and feel anyone who voted for Bush was fascist, and anyone who voted for Nader was collaborating with a fascist collaborator. This means anyone who did not vote for the candidate of your choice is either an outright fascist or a fascist fellow-traveler. I'm dazzled by such lessons in metaphysics, neo-anarchism, and basic democracy. The rhetorical overkill in your open letter is a crystal clear example of the political panic which has swept through the Democratic Party. Gore ran such a lousy campaign that he couldn't even win his home state of Tennessee. And had he won it, Florida would have been irrelevant to the outcome. But party hacks now have the bright idea that the tail of that donkey absolutely must not be pinned on that very donkey. No, pin it on the Greens instead. Spend the next four years hating Nader and getting the next corporate New Democrat on the assembly line, preferably a more life-like product than Al Gore in 2004. In a country of almost 280 million people, Gore's marginal victory in the popular election consisted of roughly 500,000 votes. Should Gore get the job? Yes, given any rules at all in our present electoral game. But our last election is proof that bipartisan "pragmatism" does not work. Could we please have a reasonable definition of democracy? The last election presented that question to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court, however, split on the expected ideological lines and decided this election among nine-- count them, nine-- men and women. The Supreme Court can't simply abolish the Electoral College, but it did have the chance to let a recount of votes proceed. In its infinite wisdom the Supreme Court ruled that we, the people, can be overruled-- even in elections already rigged by corporate money and bipartisan lockouts. The Supreme Court ruled that we, the people, should be satisfied with " a smooth transition of power." And Al Gore, when all is said and done, agreed. Al Gore did not join, much less lead, the popular protests against stolen votes and polling irregularities before and after the Supreme Court decision. Ultimately, he gave a sportsmanlike concession speech. Had he shown more spine and fight, Gore might have put a semblance of democracy back into the Democratic Party's own leadership. Why didn't he do so? Because he has a gentleman's agreement with Bush to keep the ship of state running on a bipartisan course, and too much democracy means losing the bipartisan helm. Wonderful to behold those two gentlemen agreeing to be good sports, to sail to the finish without wrecking their lovely yacht. In the company of liberal Democrats we must not even whisper that Gore and Bush belong the same class of millionaire managers. That would be rude. The only thing the Democratic Party leadership learns after every election, whether they win or lose, is to keep moving to the right. Don't take my word for it. Instead, tune in to Al From's recent broadcasts-- Al From, the biggest mouth and the dimmest bulb in the Democratic Leadership Council. He doesn't need to be smart, just ambitious and calculating. From blames Gore for being an adventurist. Imagine that-- Al Gore, that wild and crazy guy. From is busy right now explaining that Gore was too much of a left wing "populist" in the final stretch of his campaign. Nonsense, of course, since Joe Lieberman was given the job of giving winks to CEOs and telling the Chamber of Commerce that all of the rabble-rousing slogans were pure electioneering. Business, it was understood all around, would proceed as usual. Al From is one of the pillars and militants of the Democratic Leadership Council, whose whole reason for being is to beat the Republicans by joining them on issues ranging from the death penalty to "welfare reform," from "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" to the Defense of Marriage Act. Other founders and pillars of the DLC include Clinton, Gore, and Lieberman. So we're going to see a faction fight within the ruling faction of the Democratic Party. Do such politics make your eyes glaze over? Then go get some rest. But if you're going to call some folks fascists then you have to stay up late and do your homework, too. Jack, I'm curious. How does your philosophical anarchism square with lethal injections and over a billion bipartisan dollars in aid to fight the War on Drugs in Colombia, where right wing death squads are even now killing unarmed peasants as well as leftist rebels? How does your "pragmatism" work for the poorest women and children who suffered a bipartisan assault during the past eight years of "welfare reform"? Only the most mechanical Democratic Party hacks can cry bloody murder over the nomination of Tommy Thompson as Secretary of Health and Human Services-- and still suffer total memory loss about their own Dear Leader's collaboration with none other than the very same Tommy Thompson. Clinton and his team adopted many elements of Thompson's "Wisconsin Plan" when they chose to repeal many gains of the New Deal. Reform welfare? The historical record shows that welfare was destroyed on a bipartisan basis. It's time to rub the noses of Democrats in their own records, and in the genuine mess they have left behind. When this "booming economy"-- which never boomed for all-- deflates or goes bust, we won't need to wonder why so many neighbors will be falling through non-existent "safety nets." This was the work not only of right wing zealots, not only of Democratic "pragmatists," but also of those who voted for them with perfect fatalism. Taking responsibility for our votes is a good idea-- which liberal Democrats have not yet taken seriously. Recently, I wrote you a personal message of appreciation for your work and writing over the years, but noted that we would parts ways politically-- despite certain spiritual and cultural affinities, including a fondness for Lao Tzu and Whitman. As recently as January 11, you wrote me an email-- I am revealing nothing personal here-- saying, "It may be that I'll be persuaded to dump them (Democrats) and go Green all the way in the near future..." I was surprised and skeptical then, and felt you had misread my earlier messages. I am fiercely allergic to 100% partisanship of any kind whatsoever, which is the very reason I've been free in my criticisms of Nader. I might vote Green, but am not remotely tempted to go "all the way" into any sect or party. Your own enthusiasms seem more volatile. By January 16 you had learned that Greens would join many thousands of other citizens at the Counter Inaugural in Washington, D.C. on January 20, and this fact seemed to trigger an equally fervid reversal. Suddenly you were accusing Greens of political hypocrisy, daring to show our faces among other protesters against the Bush regime since, you feel, we helped elect him. If that is your conviction now, why was it not your conviction five days ago? You claim you were-- again, philosophically-- "green" before the Green Party existed. And I don't doubt you were-- the Green Party did not come from nowhere, after all, but precisely from millions of citizens with similar and long-held convictions. The question here is, once again, political. Not a question of your religious faith or mine, not a question of who gets off the wheel of karma and who goes round again. Not a question of erasing your spirited words and actions over the whole course of your life. The question is political-- specifically, electoral. The choice of compromising with one party rather than another must be argued on historical and political merits alone. No one gets out pure, no one gets out alive. If the Green Party offers to save my soul, they will earn my contempt. In politics I am seeking neither a family nor salvation, only some negotiation of rights and duties in a common world. Nothing more, nothing less. That much and that little will get my own hands plenty dirty, but I do hope my votes do not get my hands bloody with state executions and with bipartisan support for the funding of death squads beyond our borders. So let's talk about fascism, shall we? Why not invite me, Jack, to join you in an open and democratic debate online at the site where you have decently debated with me in the past on sexual politics, at the site where you say Badpuppy's "best writers" have voiced such fury at Nader and the Greens? You've shown that much good will in the past at Badpuppy, and I'll show you that much good will (if you choose) at my own website, Open Letter Online. (First issue due online end of January, 2001: http://www.openletteronline.com) My lover's father, now deceased, once wrote a fine book called Friendly Fascism. To summarize radically, Bert Gross made the argument that thoroughly corporate forms of social and economic life tend towards authoritarianism, and tend towards outright fascism if not restricted by dissent and active citizens. We now have a system of bipartisan corporatism in the United States, and whether we still have a democracy after this last election is not a question to be decided only in university seminars or in the Supreme Court. The biggest "voting irregularity" in the United States is not the usual chicanery at certain polling places, but the two party system itself-- and the system of corporate feudalism it serves. The economic and military policies our nation projects beyond our borders have undeniably aided brutal regimes, both in the past and now. People who voted for Gore in fatalism or in fear are not the enemy-- thousands of them already vote for local Green candidates when they get the chance. Nader's run for president certainly didn't hurt the Greens in San Francisco, where two Greens recently joined the Board of Supervisors. Like it or not, some voters will not be bullied into either the Democratic or the Republican ranks.
Many disgusted Democrats are looking for a way out-- but won't take the first political risks. That's the reality. The Greens, with all their faults and blunders, are doing so, and getting a fusillade of cheap shots from people standing on podiums they guard like bunkers. If the rhetoric of the Greens is sometimes poured from a cement mixer, what else is new? Partisan prose tends to be written by committee, and usually reads and sounds like it, too. That's politics-- unless the rare Abraham Lincoln or Frederick Douglass takes the stage. Nader is no Lincoln or Douglass, but he has more integrity in his little toes than three fifths of Congress on a good day. He reached and persuaded many citizens in the last election, but I hope he won't be the presidential candidate of the Greens in 2004. Better and stronger leaders can be raised up from the rank and file of the Greens. Citizens worried about basic democracy are the potential future of the Labor Party and the Green Party-- indeed, of a Labor / Green alliance which could end an anti-democratic two party system once and for all. My ambivalence regarding Nader remains what it has always been-- I've spelled that out elsewhere. But the choice for me in the last election was between a man with a spine, Ralph Nader, and two non-vertebrate corporate politicians, Al Gore and George Bush. My vote was firmly decided when Ralph Nader was escorted by security guards away from a bipartisan public debate-- not because he was crashing that party to reach the podium, but only because he held a ticket to a seat in the audience. The smug thuggery which both big parties used to silence dissent is worth a protest of your own, don't you think, Jack? The passion and rhetoric you have spent against Green voters might be reserved instead for bipartisan bullies. A political system designed to cripple and sabotage any organized electoral resistance does begin to share features with classical fascism. The same thuggery that prevented democratic debates during the last election was also used by a Democratic Mayor, a fanatically pro-death penalty District Attorney, and a bully boy Police Commissioner in my home town of Philadelphia. This city's Democratic lords were so eager to make big bucks from the Republican Convention last year that they ran a Mack truck over the Bill of Rights-- and within shouting distance of Convention Hall. Over four hundred people were swept into prison, the great majority simply for exercising First Amendment rights. Very few of the official charges are holding up in court, but City Hall calculated that episode into the cost of doing business. Urvashi Vaid parachuted into Philadelphia onto a sound stage earlier during the week of the RNC, but vanished by the time jail cells were filling with scores, and then hundreds, of citizens. No wonder young protesters of all sexual persuasions did not "ignore" the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force-- quite simply, NGLTF did not register on their radar screens at all. They had quite serious and quite different work to do. Roughly a dozen days after the worst had passed, an idealistic young staff member from the NGLTF Policy Institute gave me a call. Well, any call from NGLTF is like a call from Australia-- doesn't happen often. I was bemused when I was questioned about the police sweeps and crackdowns. Why, I asked in turn, don't you do your homework before, during, and after such events? That was then. Now I would also ask the Task Force: Why not invite a whole panel of those arrested to speak before the next annual Creating Change conference? Why not make a concerted effort to turn out your own membership for the CounterInaugural protests on January 20? Instead, the Task Force has announced a private party for Democratic politicians and patronage fans on the evening before. Now there is breathtaking honesty at long last. The partisan bonds of this "non-partisan" group are obvious to anyone who isn't intoxicated with Task Force press releases. If NGLTF gets any tax exemptions by claiming such a status, then who are we to call for more law and order? Nationally, the emerging strategy of "law enforcement" is to destroy political resistance by means of "pre-emptive strikes," and then to drop a curtsy to civil liberties after the streets and tear gas have cleared. Liberal Democrats are going to have to face the fact that unrestricted bipartisan government gave Philadelphians a police state during the Republican National Convention. The cops and politicians thought they were teaching the protesters a lesson we'd never forget. And we never will. We, the people, have the right and duty to talk back to government on January 20, and to deliver our own verdict to the Supreme Court: "Overruled." Thanks for the Invitation to Debate Dear Scott,
Thanks very much for your invitation to debate. Right this moment I'm suffering a thoroughly lousy cold and hardly feel like doing diddley-squat. But I'm forwarding your open letter to an amazing GayToday writer who has
less of the editorial burden than I do, and who has been the regular recipient of my views on the Nader business, including my open letter to the Greens.
If you will agree to debate him (and, if you wish, both of you can take what I've said in my open letter into account) I will trust him completely to engage you in the debate if he so wishes. I probably won't hear from him until late tonight. Let me know earlier, if you can, if that will be suitable for you and I'll gladly open GayToday's pages to your exchanges. By the way, the reason I addressed my open letter to "Dear Green Friends" is because I feel no animosity toward individual Greens. I very much appreciate much of what the Greens stand for, as I said in the open letter. In fact, I hope you'll recall, that when I saw the Greens on C-Span it was like being on NYC's St. Marks Place all over again in 1967. oooxxx jack Thomas Scott Tucker Replies: Dear Jack, Always put your health first, or you won't have enough left for work and for others. Between us there is an inviolable personal relation, I hope, which belongs more properly out of the political realm. I say this though we've never met and have only corresponded-- but that correspondence is meant in every sense of that word, namely, we came of age roughly in the same earlier era of hope. The young radicals today sometimes worry me, but more often they fill me with renewed hope and cheerfulness. They are going to make their own mistakes. Sometimes they will reinvent the wheel-- and make one better. Sometimes we might elder them, as Quakers say, or mentor them-- but they will tune us out like bats in the barn if we don't treat them with very, very good manners. There is something deeply right and beautiful about the custom in some meditation groups of bowing to the Buddha in each other. At that level I think we already have a fairly private understanding. In the political realm, my friend, your words and my own have gone out into the world and are on the record. Charges of fascist collaboration are serious business. I don't think that reflex came from the more deeply meditative side of you, nor even from your sharpest political side. On the contrary, I think that reflex is all too available in our political culture, and under the shadow of our own distinctly American authoritarianism. In that sense, my open letter to you was impersonal-- not addressed only to you personally, but to citizens making tough choices. I am willing to debate the writer you suggest, and thanks for the offer. Alert me if anything substantial is posted to or through you in response. The (Green) Party's Over: A Reply to Thomas Scott Tucker By BuckcuB
BUSHIT. Nader and the Greens played a small but crucial role in the series of events which gave Bush the White House. That is bad enough. But in doing so they deliberately betrayed their friends and allies, and those who were openly prepared to be their friends and allies. Stupidity is annoying, but excusable. Intentional betrayal is not. Even now it is apparent that few of Nader's lieutenants or followers admit that they were merely adoring dupes backing up Ralph's contemptuous fuck-you moment in the spotlight. Nader knew his candidacy was doomed to failure. Nader also knew he had no hope of garnering the votes necessary for major-party status. He ran anyway, even when those who rightly despised him nonetheless humbled themselves and begged him to withdraw. Why? Because Ralph Nader is an egomaniacal, bitter, warped and frustrated ideologue, who is psychotically certain that he's absolutely right and the rest of the world is absolutely wrong. In contrast to the vast majority of Nader's toadies, BuckcuB has actually met and interviewed the man. His messiah-complex is instantly evident on even short acquaintance. Because his fifteen minutes of real fame evaporated too soon for his petulant, resentful, and gigantic ego, Ralph took the opportunity of a close election to have his revenge. He never meant to advance the Green Party. He meant to fuck over the Establishment Left for sensibly marginalizing him, by intentionally spoiling the election. Now Nader and his sycophants must pay the price. But Tucker and the Greens will have none of it. Now that Bush is being installed illegitimately as President, the Green Party blithely sends out a press release announcing its intention to take part in the inaugural protests, a day late and a dollar short -- as if their own complicity in elevating Bush to the presidency will be ignored by the true opponents of the Texas Twit. The Greens will saunter into town in their rope sandals and soy-dyed-switchgrass headbands, point the finger of blame everywhere but at themselves, and expect to be instantly welcomed back into the fold. BuckcuB has a news flash for Tucker and the Greens: forget it. You aren't welcome. You fucked over your friends, and now you have nothing but enemies. You sauntered in off the playground and announced that you were joining the game, but you didn't feel obligated to play by the rules. No tough coalition-building for the Greens, no indeedy! No hard work forging alliances, compromising on the small stuff to win on larger issues, nope, you were going to start at the top -- starting at the bottom and working your way up was for suckers who accept political realities. You were a tie-dyed, self-important, rainforest-friendly army of Dogma On Crusade, headed up by Fearless Leader in his suit of rusty but 100-percent-recycled armor. All that was missing was a rousing chorus of Nader Uber Alles. Look where it got you. More importantly, look where it got the rest of us. Stuck with a casual killer, a smirking homophobe, the ultimate corporate pawn, an environmentalist's worst nightmare in the White House. Everything you profess to hate most, you helped through the door of the Oval Office over the desperate pleas of we who were once your friends. Well, Tuck, paybacks are a bitch. Who did you help? Ralph Nader and his half-mad spiteful, jealous hatred of the successful players on the Left. George W. Bush, compliant puppet of the far-right. Who did you hurt? Where would you like BuckcuB to start?! The Human Rights Campaign. The NAACP. The Congressional Black Caucus. The Sierra Club. The National Organization for Women. NARAL. Every labor union in the nation. Every environmental group in the nation. The Democratic Party. The AIDS lobby and community. The moderate wing of the Republican Party. In short, every liberal, progressive or reasonably- moderate group in the United States of America. Every man and woman who has swallowed their pride and bowed to reality to ensure the greater good in the future for those who fight the right-wing. Not least did you harm pioneering gay-rights crusader Jack Nichols, whom Tucker blithely and repeatedly insults in his tirade with various blundering attempts at wit. Nichols has been on the front lines of the Left's toughest campaign for nearly fifty years. Few of us can even begin to imagine what it was like to openly picket the White House on behalf of gay rights in 1962. Jack Nichols knows all about it -- he was there. And he has waged that campaign tirelessly ever since, through one defeat after another, through the murder of his lover, through the disheartening Johnson years and Nixon years and Ford Years and Reagan years and Bush years. Jack Nichols never gave up, never tried to take the easy way out. His early bravery set the stage for a broad new range of freedoms for gay and lesbian folks. He acted to help millions, at considerable jeopardy to himself, and he did it gladly. You, Tucker, helped only two undeserving lunatics -- Nader and Bush - - and made a hundred million enemies. Does Tucker care? Nope. The key to Tucker's distorted reasoning is his repeated dismissal of "pragmatism." The basis of his philosophy? "...I do believe politics cannot only be the art of compromise. Sometimes politics must also be the art of resistance." At the risk of repeating himself, BuckcuB must again respond: BUSHIT. Tucker, Nader, and the Greens have just been shown -- in the most concrete fashion imaginable -- the foolishness of rejecting pragmatism, and the stupidity of mounting a resistance without the requisite support to back it up. Nader, unsurprisingly, was not merely defeated but pulverized at the polls. The Green Party fell far short, by millions of votes, of the electoral support needed to gain major-party status. One might even dismiss Nader's embittered personal agenda and instead respect the brave but inevitably doomed, quixotic challenge mounted by the Greens, but for one crucial element. They did not gamble merely with their own success. The wildly-risky wager by a penny-ante player was just enough to queer the odds for the longtime high-rollers at the table. The Greens rolled the dice anyway, and lost. Now they would have us believe that they aren't responsible for the consequences, and whine as Tucker does that the true opponents of Bush will "Spend the next four years hating Nader and getting the next corporate New Democrat on the assembly line, preferably a more life-like product than Al Gore in 2004." Tucker vastly overestimates the post-defeat importance of Nader and the Greens. No one is going to spend the next four years hating Ralph Nader. Why expend the needless energy? Nader is finished -- a fringe loser crushed by the mainstream and his own hubris. He belongs to the point-and-giggle Dud Club now, along with H. Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan. His party is permanently tarred with the same brush. The rest of us have more important things to do with the next four years -- mostly working to minimize the Bushian damage enabled by the Greens' betrayal. Ninety-five percent of Tucker's "argument" consists of testy rhetoric restating a purple-prose assessment of the Green Party's platform, and smug bombast condemning the major parties in general and Democrats in particular. It is, as Shakespeare wrote, "A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." Still, Tucker would have us believe "We are debating what kind of democracy we do or do not have in the United States, and what kind of candidates do or do not serve democracy best." Alas, dear boy, "we" are debating nothing of the kind. We have a pragmatic democracy, and the debate on that point ended with the inauguration of another George, General Washington. Washington was lucky, not brilliant; powerful only because he had the pragmatic (sorry, there's that word again) foresight to marry the wealthiest widow in the Colonies; not terribly respected by the authors of the Constitution, and not respected at all as a politician or intellectual. He became our first President because it was pragmatic. Washington was popular with the common folk, and he was owed a debt (both monetary and ideological) by the founders. Politics is not merely the art of compromise. Politics IS compromise. If the Greens wish to engage in the fancy that the debate is still open after more than two hundred years, they certainly are free to do so. And it will serve them as well in the future as it has just served them in the election past. That is, to ensure their defeat. Nader and the Greens, out of a fatuous rejection of pragmatism on the one hand and a childish lust for revenge on the other, threw away the greatest opportunity with which any fringe party has ever been presented. Everything they wanted could have been theirs -- power and influence beyond their greediest aspirations; potent and wealthy allies; status and rank as a major player on the political scene. It would have cost them nothing but the tiny puff of air required to pronounce two words: "I withdraw." They declined, and not even politely. Tucker is right on one detail -- there are a myriad of reasons besides the Greens' impracticable gamble for Bush's accession to the Oval Office. Unfortunately he is missing the point. The Greens' only success in this election was to prove that a small-time participant could affect the outcome of a national election. That no one but their longtime enemies thanks them for doing so seems to be a point lost on them. That screwing the Establishment Left was the entire purpose of Nader's resentful, petulant candidacy seems to have escaped the Greens entirely. The Green Party is now learning a political reality older than the United States, older than Imperial Rome, older than even the ancient dynasties of Pharaonic Egypt. It is a reality that goes back to the first human societies, to small bands of hairy primates with opposable thumbs. And it is simply this: if you would topple the status quo, be very sure you succeed -- for if you fail you will assuredly be punished severely. The Greens failed. Now Tucker and his compatriots seek to escape the inescapable punishment. To the student of history, the scholar of politics, it is an old story. Try to whack off the King's head and fail, and your only recourse is to point the finger of blame in every direction but your own. Unfortunately for the Green Party, that old story always has the same ending. The King who wishes to keep his head will assuredly whack off that of the failed usurper. Nader's impossible spoiler candidacy changed nothing that he and his party desired to change. It merely helped to enable the installation of George Bush as president, at the expense of a majority which is justifiably angry at the result and at the traitorous meddling of the Greens which helped bring it about. Tucker rails on about the death penalty, corporate greed, the "partisan treadmill" of national politics. And what did Nader's traitorous candidacy leave us with? George Bush -- undisputed champion of the execution chamber, heir-apparent head cheerleader for unrestrained corporate greed, the ultimate rat on the partisan treadmill jogging cheerfully behind Daddy. So what, pray tell, did you accomplish, Mr. Tucker? Tucker's frantic finger-pointing is unworthy of being dignified by rebuttal. Traitors always try to blame anyone but themselves. It starts on the playground, and as this Green diatribe proves, it never stops for some fools. The Greens deserve much -- punishment, ridicule, permanent relegation to the dismissed fringe of national politics -- and they will receive it. But they do not deserve forgiveness or welcome among those of us who truly opposed George W. Bush. Those of us who have spent long years of hard work building meaningful coalitions and securing power step by agonizing step. We have worked too hard and too long, to welcome a traitorous nest of vipers back to our bosom. The Greens exist now for one purpose: to be made a political example of. An unforgettable example to any in the future who would betray their allies with a similar hopeless gamble and similar grab at misdirected vengeance. Let we who are Bush's real and steadfast opponents, we who have toiled and struggled in opposition to the Right for so long only to be betrayed by the Greens, make a memorable example of the traitors. Let us ensure that any future group which might be similarly tempted to betray us will instead blanch with fear and whisper, "No -- remember what happened to the Greens." The party's over, Tucker. The Green Party, that is. |
Many accuse Ralph Nader of putting George W. Bush in the White House 
Many other activists argue that its the Democrats, not Nader and the Green Party that are to blame for Bush's victory 
NGLTF's Elizabeth Toledo 
In a long, impassioned, and emotional harangue--call it "Unsafe At
Any Screed"--Thomas Scott Tucker would lead us to believe that
Ralph Nader and the Green Party bear no blame or responsibility for
the accession of George Bush, and deserve neither guilt nor
punishment.
© 1997-2002 BEI