Reinventing Ralph Nader: Back to the Future.

The relatively small difference between the major-party rhetoric of Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush is forcing progressive voters to look elsewhere for a presidential candidate. Although U.S. electoral laws are stacked in favor of the two-party system, third-party votes are not always "wasted" and have, in fact, changed the agendas of established parties.

For example, pre-Civil War Republicans, Populists, Progressives, and socialists persuaded so many voters to desert the major parties that significant social reforms resulted. More recently, efforts by independents and members of the New Party and the Green Party to win House seats and local offices have become a significant concern for the major parties.

With today's shrunken and fragmented electorate, however, insurgency can have an impact only with advances on two very difficult fronts: it must excite the interest of very poor and marginalized, often minority, communities where voting levels have been very low; and it must inspire middle- and working-class voters who have felt increasingly neglected by the corporatist agendas of the Clinton/Gore era. What presidential candidate is up to such a task? The Green Party's Ralph Nader may be able to rise to the occasion--but only if he corrects the weaknesses of his 1996 run.

Nader came to prominence in the mid-1960s with his expose of General Motors (which prompted GM to snoop into Nader's personal background). That expanded into other watchdog activities, including the formation of Public Citizen; Public Interest Research Group, the Center for Auto Safety, and other organizations. But some have questioned his commitment to other causes that emerged from the 1960s.

His 1996 "stealth campaign" for the White House was too sporadic to reach most middle Americans and too sectarian in its exclusive focus on economic issues to address many of the marginalized. For example, in an interview that year, he made the now notorious comment that a same-sex marriage plank in the Green platform was "gonadal politics." Many took the remark not only as contempt for an oppressed minority but disdain for non-economic areas of life. To some it also implied that pleasure was an unimportant part of human life to Nader and not a fit subject for political dialogue.

In a recent telephone interview I queried Nader about how such social issues fit into his current campaign. In addition to promising an active run this time, he seemed much more willing to address concerns about race, gender, and sexuality. "Just as corporations merge, progressive citizen groups active around such issues as race, abortion, corporate welfare, and affordable housing must pool their efforts," he argued. Continued attention to these themes and their connections will, in my judgment, strengthen his 2000 campaign.

The 1960s, of which Nader is a product, were remarkable not only for the reexamination of corporate power but equally for the emergence of overlapping movements that--however imperfect and preliminary--saw the relation among corporate power, war, racism, endless economic growth, and gender and sexual oppression within everyday life. Nader has been exemplary in his continuing efforts to build on his 1960s commitment to reform corporate power. He is right in suggesting that corporate globalism systematically disadvantages the working class and that currently fashionable "deregulation" enhances corporate privileges and imposes inordinate risks on everyone.

Nonetheless, the quarrel over culture versus class--for which Nader's 1996 candidacy became a lightning rod --is a disaster for progressive politics. Each candidate must emphasize what she or he knows best, but there is more to life than consumer and labor markets. Injustice and repression within community and family life are just as real and wrong as within the marketplace.

By the same token, however, narrowly focused attempts to redress racism and sexism while leaving the inequalities in our political economy unchecked inevitably place the economic and psychic burden of racial and gender justice on working-class white males. These narrow agendas thereby exacerbate all too prevalent forms of prejudice.

A Nader campaign under the Green banner has the potential to break new ground, not only by speaking out on both economic injustice and cultural repression but also by highlighting the ways in which they are connected. Racial profiling, "wars" against nonviolent drug users, the demonization of "welfare mothers," and homophobia do more than deprive our society of important human resources; they express and deepen the conventional stereotypes on which our current misaligned economic order is built.

Any effective third-party campaign must strive to mobilize marginalized very poor and minority communities even as it acknowledges and addresses the needs of blue- and white-collar workers. Some have properly suggested that such programs as a higher minimum wage and a child allowance for all parents of young children would be ways to build bridges between the very poor and the harried working class. In addition, programs to modernize mass transit and rebuild decaying schools would benefit the most disadvantaged while expanding job opportunities for all. These are likely to be part of the Nader campaign.

Such universal programs would ease economic insecurity and perhaps blunt the social issues, but they will not trump them. Every attempt to inaugurate such programs will meet the fierce resistance of social conservatives, who will assert modern-day variants of the theme that poverty reflects God's will or God's punishment of the poor. Modern versions of this theme stress drug use and nonmarital sexual expression, especially by teenage girls, as the cause of poverty.

Both to mobilize the marginalized and to address middle-class anxieties, the Nader campaign needs to openly address attitudes toward and stereotypes about the divisive cultural issues of sexuality, drugs, and race. One way to do that would be for Nader, a voracious reader, to add such mid- and late-1990s books as Sharon Thompson's Going All the Way: Teenage Stories of Love, Sex, and Romance and Ellen Willis' Don't Think, Smile: Notes on a Decade of Denial to his choices.

Thompson provides a powerful rejoinder to conservative efforts to portray the poor mother on welfare as inordinately lustful or conniving to live off the state. One clear finding in Going All the Way is how little calculation of future welfare payments enter into teenage sexual decisions. Instead, one's sense of self-worth seems to play the largest role.

Thompson's work contrasts a group she labels "victims of love" with another group--opposite in many ways --called the "fast track" girls. Fast track girls come primarily from reasonably secure middle-class and professional families, while her victims of love are mainly children of either very poor or working-class parents for whom college and career would be an enormous reach and are sometimes even actively discouraged by parents. For them, snaring a man--rather than a search for pleasure--is a desperate quest for survival and self-worth.

The fast track girls, on the other hand, are clearly not asexual. Some postponed sex, but others insisted on condom use by their partners and demanded pleasure and respect in their relationships. Negotiating mutually pleasurable sexual relationships became one part of a process of building a stronger sense of self. Relatively reciprocal relations in romance contributed to and emerged from work, school, and family lives. It is very clear from reading Thompson's discussion of fast track girls that one's sense of efficacy in the world emerges in part from and is sustained by one's intimate encounters.

Our drug wars grow out of and also help to sustain equally destructive stereotypes regarding the poor. Portrayed as a public health emergency, drug wars target substances whose health implications have been shown to be no worse than alcohol. And even with regard to the substances targeted, government hardly pursues an evenhanded approach. Already marginalized minority communities are the disproportionate victims of these wars and are further deprived in consequence of the economic resources wasted on them. And since the quest for modes of pleasure and escape is an ineliminable part of life for all classes, prohibition in all its forms necessarily breeds vast black markets, criminality, and police corruption. This criminality is in turn used to justify the notion that the poor are an inferior and vicious class.

As these issues suggest, cultural politics has never been an added extra or a distraction that can be simply detached from economic concerns. From its earliest days, our nose-to-the-grindstone, business-dominated culture has been legitimized by vilifying others whose only real sin is that they were different.

Single women, native Americans, immigrants, and African Americans have been condemned for values and actions that place them outside the mainstream. Especially repellent to those with such a mindset has been an emphasis on leisure time, modes of personal pleasure, community celebrations, and other activities explicitly valued more highly than material economic gain.

Practitioners of these "deviant" lifestyles also have been portrayed as biologically distinct and as natural perpetrators or encouragers of violence. Thus, the case has been made that they have needed monitoring, re-education, and coercion. And when such intrusion led to resistance, that resistance itself became further proof of these deviants' devilish ways.

Through such jeremiads against outsiders, mainstream culture might arguably be seen as revealing its own inner doubts about the emotional sacrifices its lifestyle entailed. By projecting illicit desires onto a succession of dangerous villains, these desires could be exorcised--or at least doubts about the truth of one's values could be stilled.

This continual repression of the marginalized has been sanctioned along with more subtle forms of self-monitoring and emotional repression. In the process, economic insecurity, cultural repression, and personal anger have all managed to build on each other.

Is there any possibility that U.S. citizens would be open to a politics that challenges conventional moral certainties about marginalized minorities as part of a campaign to bring economic democracy to all? Ellen Willis believes that the failed Clinton impeachment carries a message never fully appreciated by the mainstream media. In her book Don't Think, Smile, she argues that the impeachment effort lost not so much because of the purportedly prosperous state of the economy as because 1960s politics brought about some changes in the culture.

As 1960s dialogues led many people to acknowledge the diversity and complexity even of their own erotic lives, their moral and political beliefs began to change. Some came to acknowledge that through consensual dialogue within the family and democratic politics within the larger society opportunities for personal pleasure could be extended without destroying others' opportunities to pursue individual pleasure. Such efforts, far from destroying civilization, may make it more sustainable.

Today, overwork and declining leisure have become regular topics of daily conversation. The culture now seems more open to the possibility that current efforts to deny all forms of unconventional expression reflect cultural insecurities more than real threats. To his great credit, Nader now seems much more prepared to raise such issues than in 1996.

His campaign website explictly lists the great increase in Americans' working hours as a significant campaign issue. In addition, in our recent interview, Nader emphasized his concerns about the drug wars, arguing explicitly that "drugs need to be treated as a medical not a moral issue," with help provided when debilitating addictions occur. Current drug wars ape Prohibition, he said, "which has never worked," and in the process leads to "laundering by the banks and corruption of the police, which today surprisingly doesn't get the attention it did during Prohibition." More fundamentally, in language that would apply both to drug and sexuality politics, he suggests that we need to spend more time looking at the circumstances that allow most middle- and upper-class children to avoid debilitating dependencies, even while such dependencies seem the only means of economic gain or cultural escape for desperately poor minority communities.

A citizen who enjoys wide name recognition, whose ascetic lifestyle could not be challenged by the most censorious moralist, and whose past experience has made him uniquely qualified to address current realities, Ralph Nader has the potential to gain a broad hearing for the themes of his third-party presidential effort. He should address the ways in which drug wars, racial profiling, and attacks on teenage "welfare mothers" are every bit as abusive as child labor in the global sweatshops.

Whether those themes translate into votes is yet to be seen. But ecumenical standards are the best foundation for enduring politics. Nader's time-tested and well-honed politics could certainly increase the pressure on the major parties to tame the current global economy and foster more equitable opportunities for all.

John Buell is a freelance writer living in Southwest Harbor, Maine. His e-mail address is [e-mail].