[IP] more on New Yorker's Hertzberg on Nader: "Reckless Driver"
Delivered-To: dfarber+@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Sat, 06 Mar 2004 22:02:29 -0500
From: mnemonic <mnemonic@xxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [IP] more on New Yorker's Hertzberg on Nader: "Reckless Driver"
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To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx, ip@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Cc: alberti@xxxxxxxxxxxx
From: Bob Alberti <alberti@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: RE: [IP] New Yorker's Hertzberg on Nader: "Reckless Driver"
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Cc: themail@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
In the baseball of politics, the Two-Party System has bought the stadium,
the broadcast rights, the teams, and the sponsors. Anyone who doesn't want
to play baseball will be locked out. Like Nader, they will be scapegoated
and vilified by those protecting their interests.
Dear Dave,
There's no question that the two-party system in the United States is
flawed in a number of ways. Analysts as far back as Woodrow Wilson have
noted that the parliamentary form of government is far more democratic.
(See Wilson's milestone book on this subject, CONGRESSIONAL GOVERNMENT.)
Bob Alberti, however, makes the classic mistake of conflating criticisms of
the two-party system with somewhat confused notions of how third parties
tend to affect our system. The general rule is: an insurgent third party's
involvement in a presidential election tends to skew that election's
outcome to the *party whose politics is most opposed to the third party's.*
We saw this not only in 2000 (where Nader made a point of seeking dissident
Democrats in "swing" states rather than in strongly Democratic or
Republican states), but also in 1992 (Ross Perot pulled votes away from
George H.W. Bush, enabling Clinton to win with a plurality), in 1980 (John
Anderson was taking votes away from Carter until the final weeks of the
campaign), and in 1968 (George Wallace took big chunks of what was then the
southern Democrat vote, which generally supported the Democratic Party
agenda except on race-related issues).
Famously, Wilson himself was a beneficiary of the third-party effect,
because Teddy Roosevelt's Bull Moose Party (created as a vehicle for
Roosevelt to seek a third term) attracted Republican voters away from
William Howard Taft.
We may all agree that a system that leads to such results when insurgent
third parties arise and articulate issues better (at least according to
some voters) than the two major parties is a system that needs reform.
(Like Wilson, I favor parliamentary democracy over congressional democracy,
at least at the theoretical level.) What we also know, however, is that a
presidential election is not the best vehicle for third parties to push
their agendas -- they tend to lead to the election of those whose agendas
are most antithetical to their own.
Hertzberg's point, of course, is that this is one of the ironies of the
2000 election. If one percent of those who voted for Nader in Florida in
2000 had voted instead to prevent George Bush from being elected, then the
Administration that is currently presiding over the dismantling of nearly
every Nader-led reform would not have come to power. It seems that Nader
cares more about competing with the Democrats than about preserving his
public-policy legacy.
Bob Alberti's attacks on Gore and the Democrats (which are recitations of
Naderites' version of the conventional wisdom on this topic) don't make
the preceding paragraph any less true.
Finally, it should be noted that Gore's supposedly deficient campaign,
confronted with the problem of running against Bush on the right and Nader
on the left, nevertheless won a majority of the popular vote (or a
plurality, depending on how you count), and the campaign was responsible
for putting Florida in play (for months it had been assumed that Florida,
governed by George Bush's brother Jeb, was certain to go Republican). Gore
came from 10-or-more-point gap in the polls, which he labored under for
months -- constrained by campaign-law spending limitations that the Bush
campaign had sidestepped -- and brought the race to a statistical dead
heat. This is actually a pretty impressive accomplishment..
--Mike
--
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"I speak the password primeval .... I give the sign of democracy ...."
--Walt Whitman
Mike Godwin can be reached by phone at 202-518-0020
His book, CYBER RIGHTS, can be ordered at
http://www.panix.com/~mnemonic .
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