It's tough to remember just how much liberals hated Ralph Nader at the end of 2000. Some of the ire is still there among the crowd that blame Nader for squeezing a victory away from Al Gore - Nation columnist Eric Alterman says the Green Party motto should be "We Love George Bush So Much We Want to Elect Him Again!"But that looks pale beside the fury Democrats exhaled in the final days of the election. What the hell was Nader doing? Why was he essentially helping to elect a guy who would "end a woman's right to choose" and bring about the End of Days?
They weren't listening, but Nader had an answer.
Speaking at Chapman University in Oct. 2000, the candidate told his flock: "If it were a choice between a provocateur and an anesthetizer, I'd rather have a provocateur. It would mobilize us."
He meant it. Throughout the campaign Nader raised the specter of James Watt, Ronald Reagan's secretary of the interior, whom liberals suspected had been sent from Hell to destroy the ecosystem. According to Nader, the Sierra Club had doubled its membership when Watt was in power. He rhetorically asked reporters and voters: "Is it better to have a James Watt, who galvanizes the environmental movement, than Clinton-Gore, who anesthetize the environmentalists?"
That didn't tide over Democrats in 2001. But the last few months have proven Nader's point. The anti-war movement, beloved of the NU media and national media alike, wouldn't have nearly as much to report on if the man waging the war on terror was named Al Gore.
There are at least two reasons for this. In 2000, Nader and Naderites (like me) maintained that a President Bush would mangle the right wing cause with his incompetence and lay the path for a long, happy left-wing honeymoon. That hasn't quite happened, but Bush and his advisors have somewhat fumbled the unveiling of their war plans - framing an attack on Iraq as a "pre-emptive war" instead of a fulfillment of the U.N. resolutions, letting Ari Fleischer speak in public. Even baby-eating war hawks like me have grimaced at the way Bush's diplomacy has worked sometimes.
But that wasn't Nader's point. He knew that Republicans made the anti-war crowd angry and the anti-globalization crowd angrier. Only the most hardcore activists had broken with supporting Bill Clinton, because he was a Democrat and thus, on their side. Not so with Bush. His is the face that launched a million paper-mache puppets.
I can back this up. In December 1998, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair launched a bombing campaign on Iraq, Operation Desert Fox, which involved the launching of 415 cruise missiles and 200 other bombs. Clinton justified the attacks thusly: "Saddam Hussein has used weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles before. I have no doubt he would use them again if permitted to develop them. When I halted military action against Saddam last November after he had terminated the UNSCOM operations, I made it very clear that we were giving him a last chance to cooperate."
The rhetoric was similar to what Bush's team is saying in 2003, minus the humanitarian aspect of actually removing Saddam Hussein. But what was the reaction?
In New York City, 600 protestors organized to march and hear a speech by Ramsey Clark. The Houston Chronicle filed reports of "nearly a hundred" members of the Young Socialists waving banners in the streets. Denver saw a dozen activists come together; in Minnesota, 125 activists met with Sen. Paul Wellstone for an anti-war forum.
That was it; and these protesters were the hard Left, the kind that think Kim Il Jong is a shining beacon of hope and equality. They weren't joined by the Hollywood activists or the liberal punditocracy - because those types were busy backing Bill Clinton.
Sheryl Crow, who has taken to vocally opposing "Mr. Bush's war" in the last year, spent one night of the Desert Fox campaign performing at the White House. Two years previous she had entertained troops in Bosnia; she told reporters that "once over there I felt extremely patriotic. Here are these people, from 18-year-olds to military veterans, enduring real duress for the cause of peace."
But there are more salient examples of the way George Bush has inspired liberals to oppose what they used to accept as just foreign policy. According to the Audit Bureau of Circulations, liberal Mother Jones magazine has increased sales by 48.8 percent in the last year. The New Republic is up 42.3 percent, Harper's Magazine is up 28.1 percent and The Nation is up 15.9 percent.
I bring this up because our student government has spent the last few weeks trying to justify an anti-war resolution. The bill's chief sponsor, who very nearly became our ASG president last year, says a war on Iraq is "certain" to have a racist backlash.
The wars of the 1990s didn't face the righteous wrath of ASG resolutions. Nader was right: No matter what the issue is, or what the repercussions, Progressive battles are easier when the guy in the White House has an "R" next to his name.
