Race for the Nadir

I've never been able to understand the people who despise Ralph Nader for "handing" Bush the 2000 election. That's not just because I voted for Bush in that election and wanted him to win. It's because there was something distinctly undemocratic, even downright sinister, in regarding Nader voters as a resource to be manipulated—in believing that they could be saved from their stupidity only by being deprived of their choice. Hate them for casting their ballots as they did, but the rage directed at Nader himself gives up the game entirely. We'd all have done things differently had we been presented with different—better—candidates, but what happened is what happened.

Nader, it seems, wishes things had happened differently: Now he believes that Bush is about as awful a president as we could have elected.

Near the end of An Unreasonable Man, a sympathetic but not uncritical documentary portrait of Ralph Nader by a former protégé, Henriette Mantel, and Steve Skrovan, the film’s subject allows himself the bitter pleasure of joining his fellow left-wingers in what has now become the cliché of wondering if George W. Bush is "the worst president ever." Until then, Mr Nader’s stubborn refusal to take responsibility for Mr Bush’s election in 2000 by splitting the progressive vote had made perfect sense. For if you accept the Naderite view that the two major parties are increasingly indistinguishable, then the value of his offering the electorate a real choice must far outweigh any trivial differences there might have been between a Gore and a Bush presidency. But now here was the man himself telling us that, in effect, the barbs of his Democratic critics — whose hatred and vitriol directed at him appear here at times to be even greater than the same directed at the President — were justified all along.

Nader is a ridiculous figure in many ways. As Bowman writes, "This, after all, is the man who went after the meat-packing industry by calling hot dogs 'missiles of death.'" But he'd be less ridiculous if he refused to give credence to the idea that our decisions should be circumscribed and micromanaged into what is "reasonable." Let him be an unreasonable man. The electorate is made up of adults, and adults can learn from their mistakes, wherever and however they find them.