Where is ralph nader on the political spectrum

Nader has run for President of the United States as an independent and third party candidate. His central campaign theme has been the need for electoral reform. Army as a cook at Fort Dix. In he was admitted to the bar and began practicing as a lawyer in Hartford, Connecticut. In , he moved to Washington, D. In Unsafe at Any Speed was published. Nader had researched case files from more than lawsuits then pending against General Motors' Chevrolet Corvair to support many of the claims in his book.

This was met with a vicious reaction from General Motors. In their efforts to discredit Nader, the company went so far as to wiretap his phone and to hire prostitutes in an attempt to catch him in a compromising situation. But these efforts failed. At the hearing, Roche admitted, when placed under oath, that the company had hired a private detective agency to investigate Nader. He used the proceeds to found the activist organization the Center for the Study of Responsive Law.

In "Nader's Raiders" a name given by someone in the Washington press corps were created with the mandate of evaluating the efficacy and operation of the Federal Trade Commission FTC.

The group published a report which was critical of the FTC as a do-nothing regulatory body. Based on the results of that second study, President Richard Nixon ordered changes to the agency to make it more effective. In , Nader founded the watchdog group Public Citizen, a consumer rights lobby.

He served on its board of directors until It was in the early 70s that Nader's name began to be considered as a potential candidate for president for the first time. In , he was asked to run as the presidential candidate for the New Party, a progressive split-off from the Democratic Party, but he declined the offer.

Instead he turned his attention to environmental activism. One of his primary causes was opposition to nuclear energy. In he formed a group called The Critical Mass Energy Project, a national anti-nuclear group that had with several hundred local affiliates and approximately , supporters.

The powerful nuclear power industry discovered this difference in , when a tight coalition of conservative, environmental and taxpayer groups defeated the deficit-ridden Clinch River Breeder Reactor in Tennessee. More recently, in , demands coming from both the left and right that Congress ban genetic discrimination by health insurers overcame the corporatist lobby. In several polls, including ones by Businessweek and Gallup, a sizable majority of Americans say that corporations have too much control over their lives, that both major parties are failing and that America is going in the wrong direction.

Once this slowly awakening giant of American reform shucks off the corporatists who divide, distort and deny many common identities, a dynamic civic force for freedom, fairness and prosperity will define and advance its own political and electoral agendas. All Rights Reserved. Skip to Main Content Skip to Search. News Corp is a global, diversified media and information services company focused on creating and distributing authoritative and engaging content and other products and services.

Dow Jones. Nader and the Greens also favored deep cuts in the US military budget and apparatus and opposed US material support for reactionary regimes and policies around the world. This is a point that merits consideration because the discussion of the Nader campaign, even on the left, has focused almost entirely on his critique of the domestic imbalance of power, giving very slight attention the international aspects.

The United States is the dominant imperial power in the world and this is the central unspoken truth of our times. Indeed, Nader the candidate never got the opportunity to communicate these or any other positions to the great mass of Americans because his campaign was absolutely butchered in the news media. This should be no surprise but it was sobering nonetheless. Without gobs of money to purchase TV advertising—the lingua franca of US politics—or, better yet, without the sort of massive grassroots operation that could overcome the media blackout, many citizens never had any idea that Nader was running vigorously or what his positions were on the issues he was addressing.

If the winner of the election were determined by who spent the least for each of their votes or who received the least amount of news coverage per vote, Nader would have won in a landslide. Most of the media attention Nader did receive was obsessed with how his candidacy would affect the fortunes of Democrat Al Gore.

This was true even on the left and among progressives. The race highlighted again how the US electoral laws have a deeply conservative and undemocratic bias that increases dramatically the degree of difficulty for both third parties and progressives. In our view, the Nader campaign was the electoral side of the mass organizing that produced the extraordinary demonstrations in Seattle in and in Washington, DC, and at the two national political conventions in As with those demonstrations, there is no guarantee that this upsurge in activism will produce a sustained movement capable of fundamentally changing the existing order.

But we believe the evidence suggests that there are new openings for popular left organizing in the United States, and that the chance to organize for progressive electoral candidates is better than at any time in memory. It is possible that a left electoral movement can, within a generation, become a dominant political force in the nation. It may not be an explicitly socialist movement that will invoke the icons of the left that MR readers cut their teeth on but it will be a progressive anticorporate movement by any measure.

There is an important and necessary role for the socialist left in this movement. The implications of these developments go well beyond the United States, in view of the US role as the dominant global capitalist power. If a viable prodemocracy, anti-imperialist movement can emerge here, it will improve the possibilities dramatically for socialists and progressives worldwide.

It is an indication of how much times are changing that we can actually discuss the US left and electoral politics in the pages of MR without being purely hypothetical or dismissive.

That Wallace was clobbered so badly was a signal that the left was under attack and entering a long period of decline. The notion of an electoral third party was soon abandoned.

Many on the left, along with those generally sympathetic to the left, opted to work through the Democratic Party in the second half of the century, to make it more progressive than it would have been otherwise.

Communist Party USA-instigated groups, the Democratic Socialists of America, and the Rainbow Coalition have been but a few of the vehicles used by progressives in attempts to push the Democrats to the left. Other leftists downplayed electoral work, though they usually hoped the Democrats would win to the extent that they cared. With little to show for these efforts, it was easy for some on the left to dismiss electoral politics as inherently corrupt and limited in value, if not a waste of valuable time and resources.

It is an illusion to think that electoral work is the be-all, end-all of politics. Parliamentary systems are the result of intense mass struggle, among other things, and ruling classes will invariably dismiss the results and turn to extralegal measures if their interests are threatened in a fundamental manner. Indeed, as the election highlighted, capitalist political parties will abandon their commitment to fairness even in squabbles with each other, let alone a socialist party.

Viable left electoral politics has always found its basis in well-developed nonelectoral political organizations and activism. With nonelectoral popular movements in place, the electoral campaigns have a foundation to build upon, and answer to.

If this link is broken and the electoral campaign achieves success yet loses touch with popular movements, bad things tend to happen. Likewise, if a progressive candidate gets caught up in the personalization of politics, and loses the necessary sense of humility and political principle, worse things tend to happen.

This justifies skepticism toward, but not outright dismissal of, electoral politics. Relatively well-conducted electoral movements, like the Nader campaign or, going back in history, the Eugene Debs Socialist Party campaigns early in the century, can help build nonelectoral movements, and vice versa.

Although Debs never got more than 6 percent of the vote as a presidential candidate, his campaigns were instrumental in galvanizing socialist and union organizing. And in our current closed political culture, a presidential campaign is one of the very few places where meaningful political issues can be raised at a national level and political education take place. Even with all the obstacles in its way, the Nader campaign probably exposed more Americans to progressive positions on political issues than anything else has for quite some time.

The campaign was an important and necessary step to take the straightjacket off US political debate. But electoral campaigns without corresponding nonelectoral movements end up being mostly of the protest variety and of limited value. Moreover, electoral politics does not mean simply working on presidential campaigns. It might be judged strategically sound, for example, for those on the left to emphasize referenda and other races over making another presidential run in That will depend upon circumstances that develop over the next year or two.

In recent years, there has been a debate among US progressives who do electoral work over whether it is best to emphasize local races or national races.

The argument for the former goes that local races are more winnable and less expensive and can therefore give left parties a chance to be effective and attract new supporters. The argument for the latter, like we state above, is that in a depoliticized society like the United States, it is only in presidential races that people and the news media will pay much attention to political ideas; it is an opportunity to be used for political education.

An electoral strategy geared to the genuine transformation of society would ideally pursue both local and national races, as well as link with nonelectoral popular movements. Some of the success of the local Workers Party candidates is attributable to the publicity for the party generated by the dramatic presidential runs of Lula over the past twelve years.

It is as intriguing a recipe as we have seen for using electoral politics to assist in establishing democratic socialism. Likewise, Nader and the Greens always argued that the campaign was part of building a longterm majoritarian movement to overturn corporate domination of politics and the economy.

But in , with rising movements against sweatshops, military imperialism, corporate globalization, capital punishment, the prison-industrial complex, economic and racial inequality, and environmental devastation, among others, it would have been absurd to tell activists to bury the hatchet and work for Gore, who upon election would become their direct opponent in most battles on these issues. In addition to rising popular movements, and related to them, is another factor that explains the surge of interest in left third-party electoral activity: the thoroughgoing deterioration and collapse of the US electoral system over the past three decades.

Even at its best, electoral politics in the United States in the past century has been fairly gruesome, with the wealthy holding far too much power and the poor and working class significantly depoliticized and in some cases, such as the Jim Crow South, disenfranchised.

Saying those positive words wasn't easy for him, because he felt that Gore had treated him and other egalitarian activists shabbily over the previous eight years, but there was just enough politician in him to squeeze the words out.

Gore, of course, did not return the favor, saying little or nothing about Nader during the regular campaign, and limiting his official role to a few fringe appearances. Not that Nader was a wilting lily; as a supporter of the party's candidate, he took advantage of the campaign fervor to visit liberals and egalitarians on his own hook everywhere he could, working to convince the few remaining holdouts for futile third parties that they could have more influence inside the Democratic Party than outside it.

He also used these visits to start Egalitarian Democratic Clubs in 43 states, laying the basis for the future takeover of the party in the same way liberals had taken over the California state party with their California Democratic Clubs in the s. He also used these occasions to make plans for the national post-election Egalitarian Democrats convention that was held in March, Although Gore continued to ignore Nader after his narrow victory, which was decided late in the evening by the electoral votes in New Hampshire and Florida, he quietly paid off the left with several of his second- and third-level appointments.

Former Naderites gained some influence at the Environmental Protection Agency and Occupational Safety and Health Administration, where they implemented several rulings and regulations that the Clinton-Gore team had been sitting on because they did not want to stir up the corporate pressure groups.

Nader's decision to help send a moderate Democrat to the White House also made good sense in terms of the leverage it gave liberal Democrats in the Senate. Moreover, Nader earned credit for helping the Democrats come very close to a House majority, thanks to last-minute victories in districts in Michigan, New Jersey, and New Mexico, where his visits helped to reduce the vote for Green Party candidates just enough for the Democrats to squeak by.

But it was not just his tireless work. Nader also forcefully articulated the point now brilliantly demonstrated by several outstanding economists -- it is possible to modify the worst aspects of capitalism to a considerable degree through market-based planning based on taxes, subsidies, government purchases, and regulations. There is no such thing as a "free market" that can operate without careful government regulation, as demonstrated once again by the scam artists from Enron, Global Crossing, and other fraudulent "new economy" companies, not to mention all the slick hustlers on Wall Street, but the centralized, non-market planning that is the essence of "socialism" doesn't work either.

So the issue is not planning, as Nader patiently explained, but what kind of government planning and by whom, which means the basic necessity is political power within a market system. Although Nader was unrelenting in his criticism of corporations and those individuals and groups who support the economic and political status quo, he was careful not to attack "the capitalists," "the rich," or "the ruling class.

Even though there is a dominant social class of corporate owners and top executives, who have different interests from people who work for wages and salaries, it did not make sense to him to rely on a class-based "Us" versus "Them" framing. He understood that the issue is ultimately a value-based program and political power, and he knew from past experience that some members of the ownership class might come to support part or all of his platform.

In fact, knowing that defectors from an elite group can be very important to insurgent causes, he emphasized that many wealthy people already were among his supporters. He therefore confined himself to attacks on corporate greed and those who oppose greater equality, fairness, and opportunity.

He defined the opposition as the "corporate-conservative coalition" and the Republican Party. In so doing he drew upon the magnificent example of the early Civil Rights Movement, which wisely refused to label all whites as enemies, but only racists and bigots, and thereby provided an opening whereby prejudiced whites could change their minds and adopt new values in the light of new information and changing circumstances.

In addition, Nader's longstanding connections with grassroots social movement organizations means that those organizations will have more clout because they are now linked to a solid electoral strategy.

By being inside and outside of electoral politics, the wider egalitarian movement he is championing can have the best of both worlds. Most of the time its members can continue to work in specific environmental, social justice, or workplace organizations that have no electoral focus, but they also can involve themselves periodically in electoral politics through the Egalitarian Democrat Clubs.

Moreover, Nader put a strong emphasis on the power of what is now called "strategic nonviolence," or nonviolent direct action, stressing that is the only method for prevailing in a conflict that is consistent with maintaining and expanding political democracy.

He and his forces thereby tried to marginalize those activists whose calls for property destruction and retaliatory attacks on the police at demonstrations have undermined the outreach potential of the global justice movement. In focusing on nonviolence, Nader urged that activists now build on the work of the strategists who have catalogued many dozens of nonviolent direct action tactics and documented their usefulness in a variety of countries and settings.

In particular, they can draw inspiration and training methods from the early Civil Rights Movement, which was a picture-perfect example of the power of strategic nonviolence through its combination of sit-ins, freedom rides, boycotts, and marches. No matter what the future may bring in the face of a formidable corporate power structure and a great many citizens satisfied with the status quo, Nader's decision to take egalitarian activism into the Democratic Party was a sensational expenditure of moral capital, providing egalitarians with new hope and a new direction.

Well, that's the way it should have been. If that scenario had been carried out, the United States would look very different today, and those seeking greater equality, fairness, and opportunity would be making plans to expand on their successes. Why, then, do so many egalitarians try to build new third parties of the left in the face of overwhelming structural odds and terrible historical precedents, always ending up with a meager few percent of the vote, far less than they expect?

Then, too, why is there no sustained effort to create programs for greater fairness and equality based on planning through the market, a decentralized approach consistent with democratic participation in the political arena? Furthermore, why are so many egalitarians hesitant to speak out against violent tactics at demonstrations, thereby implicitly conceding moral leadership to those who think that the destruction of property or violence towards persons are a virtue or an eventual necessity?

If you have ever asked yourself any of these questions, then there are other documents on this web site that may be of interest to you. Although these documents are often critical of past leftist strategies, they do not say everything egalitarians have done is counterproductive. To the contrary, egalitarians played a catalytic role in every movement that led to the expansion of individual rights and opportunities in the United States in the twentieth century, starting with the women's suffrage campaign, the creation of industrial unions, and the Civil Rights Movement, and continuing today in movements for gender equality, racial and ethnic equality, environmental protection, and rights for gays and lesbians.

In each case, new nonviolent methods have been invented by egalitarians to disrupt the routines and belief systems of those who favor the status quo, everything from strikes to sit-ins to outing to locking down. So, too, the living-wage and anti-sweatshop campaigns have been brilliantly done. They have made just the right use of research, litigation, strategic nonviolence, and media.