SHORTSIGHTED Democrats see Ralph Nader as ancient Athenians saw Socrates: as a dissenting, unreasonable man. But here, in all of the West, 2,400 years after Socrates was put to death, we view him as the grandfather of philosophy, as the seed of all our thought.Socrates has pushed open the doors for an expansive free speech, has legitimized resistance to a cruel state, and poetically embodies democratic possibility. In Ralph Nader, I see something similar.
For most Americans, car safety, clean air, labeled food, disability rights, and freedom of information, are extremely important. But these things had to be fought for. As a young lawyer, Nader lobbied Congress to pass the Clean Air Act, the Wholesale Meat Act and the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Act. Because of Ralph Nader, the EPA regulates airborne contaminants, the FDA inspects meat products and slaughterhouses, and the auto-industry is forced to make cars with seat belts.
All Americans embrace Nader's initiatives with pride, but embittered Democrats view the man with shame. Because when they remember the 2000 presidential election, uncreative Democrats think of one word: spoiler. Rather than remembering how Gore lost his home state of Tennessee, or how 250,000 registered Democrats in Florida voted for Bush, or how Nader actually earned Gore more votes, as Professor Solon Simmons of George Mason University has researched (by forcing Gore farther left), uncritical Democrats choose to isolate one out of dozens of variables . To blame Nader instead of the Democratic party, or simply the Republican party, for President Bush's electoral victory is unfair, inaccurate and cowardly.
Contrary to what cynical Democrats will have us believe, Nader is part of a long history of third party social justice. The abolitionist movement, women's suffrage, and laborers' and farmer's rights all started out as third party platforms. Another third party - the Republican party - was created to challenge the Democrats and the Whigs, which in the late 1850's were both pro-slavery. It was Lincoln's third party that freed the enslaved.
When third parties espouse a controversial and important issue -- say, Social Security, as the Populists did in the late 19th century -- citizens begin to pay attention to that novel idea. As attention grows, so does vote-getting power, and one of the two major parties begins to talk about it themselves; they steal the rhetorical momentum of the third party. Child labor laws, Social Security and worker's compensation, which are all championed by Democrats, originally began as third party issues. So rather than strictly attempting to secure an elected office, third parties effectively expand, renew and revitalize the national political discourse.
Nader's goal is not to thwart the Democratic party. Through dissent, he hopes to make its members appear more authentic; he wants to liven political debate to make each Democratic candidate stand taller. Where Sen. McCain speaks of war in Iraq, Nader will force Sen. Obama and Sen. Clinton to speak about peace in Palestine. When McCain talks about the successes of the troop surge, Nader will make the Democratic nominee talk about the failings of military excess and the taxpayer's burden of an enormously bloated defense budget.
Without Nader forcing the Democrats to adopt a more progressive platform, there is no limit to how debased the party can become. If leftists like Naderremain quiet, then we will continue to get the Democratic party that we have now. A party so cowardly that when Rep. Kucinich, a Democrat from Ohio, introduced a bill to impeach Vice President Cheney -- for misleading the public about WMDs -- nearly all Republicans voted (strategically) to hear debate, while nearly all the Democrats voted to stuff the bill back into committee. The Republicans tried to embarrass the Democrats, to show the nation that their colleagues across the aisle do not have the courage to declare in public what they whisper in private. They succeeded.
Americans are now faced with a party that exaggerates fearsto justify war and another that is too afraid of losing votes to do anything about it. The choice is what our University's former philosopher Richard Rorty wrote, "between cynical lies and terrified silence."
When Americans pay attention to Nader, we are forced to debate over safer cars, cleaner water and better air. When Nader is ignored, we are left with unchecked corporate greed, a wasteful and unaccountable government and candidates like John Kerry. If persuasion is the language of democracy, then silencing Nader is like diminishing our country's ability to speak, it is to impoverish our political discourse, it is to render ourselves inarticulate. When pragmatic voices are ignored, bumper-sticker slogan exchange becomes the grammar of political speech. "Cut and Run" and "End This War" come to be our sentences, and (D) and (R) turn into the words we live by. Like Socrates, Nader believes in the system which he fights against, but he uses democracy's ideals to fix its shortcomings. He wants to work within the flawed electoral arena so that it may later be repaired. Like Socrates, Ralph Nader stands to expand democratic possibility.
Hamza Shaban is a Cavalier DailyViewpoint writer.
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