more on New Yorker's Hertzberg on Nader: "Reckless Driver"

[Dave Farber <dave () farber net>]

Delivered-To: dfarber+ () ux13 sp cs cmu edu
Date: Sat, 06 Mar 2004 22:02:29 -0500
From: mnemonic <mnemonic () well com>
Subject: Re: [IP] more on New Yorker's Hertzberg on Nader: "Reckless Driver"
X-Sender: mnemonic () pop panix com
To: dave () farber net, ip () v2 listbox com
Cc: alberti () sanction net

> From: Bob Alberti <alberti () sanction net>
> Subject: RE: [IP] New Yorker's Hertzberg on Nader: "Reckless Driver"
> To: dave () farber net
> Cc: themail () newyorker com

> 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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