Who To Fear

I’ve been reluctant to discuss last week’s Presidential election, mostly because my guy won, and I think it would be rude to gloat. But it remains on my mind. Here are a few observations:

Obama has been compared to a lot of predecessors, from Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy to Adlai Stevenson. But my own comparison is with another Illinois politician, namely John Anderson, who ran first as a moderate Republican and then as a 3rd party candidate for President back in 1980, eventually garnering a little under 7% of the vote. For a time, Anderson had a grassroots, charismatic appeal, much like Obama, garnering a lot of attention for his “fresh”, non-partisan approach to politics, and Anderson was the darling of political cliques in college campuses around the country. I was living in UCLA’s Sproul Hall in 1980 and witnessed more than one Anderson rally, and the do-gooder unctuousness of these folks really turned my off. I have the feeling that I would have felt the same way about Barack Obama if I was on a college campus today.

In fact, I didn’t care for any of the three major candidates in 1980 and ended up voting for Ed Clark, the Libertarian, back when many Libertarians were actually progressive on social issues. Clark campaigned on a platform of reduced military engagement and “low tax liberalism” (the frightening pro-America, anti-rights folks, a la Bob Barr, didn’t gain a stranglehold on the Libertarian Party until the late 80’s.) Clark ended up getting a little over 1% of the vote, the best nationwide performance for a Libertarian Presidential candidate to date.

Another thought about the recent election originated from my wife, Melissa. A guy we know here in Chicago had been an enthusiastic Obama supporter from early on. When his Brooklyn-based sister-in-law would fret about “the herd that went for Bush” also going moving en masse against Obama, he would, having been raised in Ohio, come to the defense of the mass of middle Americans, saying that “sometimes, you just have to trust the people.” When this debate was reprised after the election, Melissa responded, “They’re just another herd, it’s just that this herd voted for our guy.” Well put.

With two or three possible exceptions, just about everyone in my circle of friends voted for Obama. But the same cannot be said for my in-laws. I’m not exactly sure, but my guess is that there were 2 votes for McCain, 5 for Nader, and 1 for Bob Barr. To the best of my knowledge, the only folks in her immediate family who voted for Obama were Melissa and I. Anyone who has read this site knows that I don’t think much of Bush, McCain, Palin, or just about any of the current crop of Republicans. But I’ve come to the conclusion that, despite the fact that George W. may have set this country back a generation, Republicans are an essentially manageable threat to our democracy. The same cannot be said for Ralph Nader.

There is nothing more dangerous than an idealist, particularly one that dreams of attaining power. When you hear a political leader promise “Peace, Land, and Brotherhood” or call for “A Campaign of One Hundred Flowers,” it is a clear signal to collectively kill that movement by any means necessary, because by the time you realize that they mean to take away the life and liberty of all who oppose them, it will do no good to grab your gun and run for the hills.

Nader’s bloodlust, his preoccupation with “arresting the executive crooks” in corporate America, in fact his desire to eliminate any rights of “corporate personhood,” a path whose logical end is that anyone who opens a business would be subject to the confiscation of his personal property by the legal system, reminds me of nothing so much as the rantings of the Khmer Rouge against the business class of their own country, to whom they proffered the slogan, “To keep you is no benefit; to destroy you is no loss.” As we subsequently found out, Pol Pot meant that quite literally. History has repeatedly demonstrated that when a political leader threatens to spill blood in the name of his cause you should take him at his word.

I admit, I first grew to hate Ralph Nader as a child. Our neighbor, who we called Uncle Bob, was a real car buff, and at one point he drove a Chevy Corvair. He would talk about the mechanical wonders of that car, and how it was a tragedy that it was railroaded out of existence by Mr. Nader, who Uncle Bob referred to as “a real Bozo.” I may have been a child at the time, but even then I hated the tearing down of something beautiful for personal notoriety or out of some oversized notion of justice, and, as it turns out, Uncle Bob was actually right, as the Corvair was eventually tested and found not to have most of the structural flaws that Nader alleged. But it was too late for the vehicle, whose sales had already plummeted

But it is one thing to cripple a car brand and entirely another to cripple your country. Nader had to know that his presence on the ballot in 2000 could tip the balance to George Bush in a close election, and, as it turned out, it did, as Al Gore would almost assuredly have won the state of Florida, and thus the election, if Nader’s name were not on the ballot. Now, I was never a big fan of Al Gore. I didn’t vote for him in the Democratic primary, and I don’t care for him now. He and his hollow blond wife are such typical Baby Boomers, with their smug presumption that they are at the cutting edge of everything interesting and cool, when actually they are two of the dullest fucks on the planet. However, I had the common sense to see that, while Al Gore was personally repugnant, George W. was a national calamity in waiting.

For some reason, Nader never realized this. In fact, years later, he claimed that the election of George W. Bush was essentially no different than a Gore Presidency would have been. Tell that to the 5,000 dead and 50,000 maimed U.S. soldiers in Iraq, or to our children and grandchildren, who will be paying off the budget deficits engendered by the Bush Administration for decades. Nader never did exactly admit he was wrong about Bush not being any worse than Gore, although he did eventually change his tack, claiming that it was actually Al Gore’s fault for not having the competency to win that election by enough votes so that Nader’s impact wouldn’t have mattered. Like I said, if there’s one thing that people need to fear, it is an idealist with no shame.

Admittedly, Nader has become a harmless, irrelevant force in our country. But our collective goal should be to keep it that way and to actively oppress the ability of others like him to spread their virus to, as Melissa calls them, “the herd”, or in more polite terms, the general public, because if history has taught us anything, it’s that we are a bloodthirsty species, easily cowed.