Where Ralph Nader Went Wrong

You can’t rely on your government if you can’t rely on yourself. But if you can rely on yourself, you won’t need to rely on your government

A Hero

Ralph Nader is one of the most inspiring and heroic figures in American life in the past 50 years. As a private citizen, he exposed and publicized faults in American manufacturing, corruption in political office, and pollution in air and water. He showed us all how one man armed with the truth could defy the nation’s most powerful corporations and government bodies, and win. He exemplifies the core of the bourgeois, democratic republic: the independent individual who speaks the truth with neither fear nor favor. In this we should all applaud him and what is more, follow in his footsteps.

But he made one misstep.

And this has haunted and defeated all his hopes and dreams.

Us Not Them

What was Mr Nader’s mistake? It lay not in the problems that he found, but in the solutions that he sought.

He thought the government should (and would) address the problems he pointed out. He thought the government should be filled with just, wise, conscientious men. And he thought that we, the citizens, could be counted on to elect these just, wise, and conscientious rulers even though we were incapable or unwilling to learn the truth ourselves or govern our own lives well.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Mr Nader should have known it was wrong, too. There among his complaints you can find it: many of the changes he sought were already embodied in the law. ‘We don’t want the government to pass new laws,’ he said regarding one issue. ‘We just want the government to start enforcing the laws that are already on the books.’

But if the government was ignoring its own laws, then it was already full of fools and knaves; and we had already elected these fools and knaves.

No, the fault lay not in our leaders but in ourselves, and so in ourselves the answer must also lie.

The Answer

The correct (and only) answer to such problems, as Mr Nader pointed out, lies in publicity. Not to awaken the lawmakers and regulators, but to awaken us citizens. The truth must be shouted from the rooftops for all of us to hear. Then we must count on us, as citizens and buyers, to do the right thing and make the right choices. For if we cannot or will not do what is right in our own lives and in our home towns, then we can’t be expected to do what is right in voting for lawmakers either.

The main fault, you see, that lay under the problems Mr Nader found, was not with our government — it was with our press.

Ultimately of course the fault does lie with us citizens, each and every one of us and all of us as one body. For we choose the press we buy and read and watch even more than we choose our lawmakers.

Instead of talking to lawmakers, then, Mr Nader should have been running printing presses. Instead of publishing books, Mr Nader should have been publishing magazines, newsletters, and newspapers. And along with pointing to problems, defects, and corruption, Mr Nader in these periodicals should have been praising good companies, good products, and good ways for us to save money, invest wisely, and clean our environment.

Would we have listened? Maybe not. When Ronald Reagan became President, he succeeded in achieving a revolution in national amnesia. As H. L. Mencken once observed, people would rather believe a comfortable lie than a painful truth. The evidence of what Americans have done over the past quarter-century offers little hope that most of us would have been willing to turn off the mindless entertainment, drop the pizza beer and dope, and wake up and deal with the problems we faced then — and still face today, because we didn’t face them then.

But if we can’t rely on ourselves, who can we rely on?

Who Can You Trust?

Even if Mr Nader’s goals had been met, and we had by some miracle been granted wise and incorruptible lawmakers, what would we have won? A temporary relief from the problems of the day. But a worse evil would have crept upon us. It is the evil of dependence. For many of the bad things Mr Nader found and rightly condemned came about not in spite of the progressive laws Mr Nader championed. They came about because of those very laws.

Where the government acts to shield and protect its citizens from all evil, it trains us to rely upon it — and not rely on ourselves. We no longer need to check each product for safety, to research companies and what they do with their waste, to buy magazines that objectively evaluate the products. ‘The government wouldn’t let them sell it if it weren’t safe, or good, or healthy,’ we say. ‘They wouldn’t let them poison our air or water.’ And so we make choices in buying based entirely on taste and appeal, and on price. In this way we give companies a strong incentive to make flashy, appealing goods, and skimp on quality.

We end up with junk food that looks good, smells good, tastes good, and lacks nutrition and is bad for our health.

So we eat junk food, wear junk clothes, sit in junk furniture, drive junk cars, and live and work in junk buildings. And when we go to the polls, we elect junk lawmakers, governors, mayors, and presidents.

And when we buy the junk, we drive the good companies (and candidates) to compete on equal terms and offer only junk of their own. Or else they go out of business (or political life).

NOLA Blues

The heart-rending sight of the refugees of Hurricane Katrina starving in the Super Dome in New Orleans is a metaphor for all of us. Those people believed in their government. They counted on their government to help save them. They trusted so much that they endured those awful, worsening conditions rather than march across the bridge to freedom. Some did try to march, and were met by the armed representatives of their government forcing them back to horror and death. But too few marched to outface, shame, and overcome those armed government employees.

Here in America, are we condemning ourselves to huddle inside one giant Super Dome? Or will we turn our backs on our government leaders, count on them no longer, and march ourselves across the bridge to our own self-reliant welfare?

(Composed with pen on paper 25 January 2008)