my goodness, ralph nader certainly does blow goats. i don't care about his egomania or his stridency or any of his policy stances. what i'm more scornful of is this: nader thinks that he is qualified to be the president of the united states, and nevertheless fatally misunderstands the workings of american democracy.

either that, or he actually doesn't care a whit about progress, which is an interesting problem in a supposed progressive.

here's the deal: because we have a single chief executive and a congress based on single-member winner-take-all districts, we are going to have a two-party system. period, the end. occasionally the character of the two parties will change, and at times of crisis one of the parties may be demolished and replaced. there may even be serious and well-supported attempts at third parties. but all such attempts will either cause the demolish-and-replace phenomenon above, or remain marginal, or fade away entirely.

i could engage in a stream of relentless citation here; after all, this is My Thing About Which I Can Blather Forever. i could tell you about the ways this is good and bad and ugly and interesting and whatnot in comparison to, say, the proportional parliamentary system in sweden or the mixed member proportional system in germany. but i won't, because that could be seriously long and boring.

what i'm really interested in expressing is the need for leftists (self included) to be active and vocal *within* the democratic party. i know that many of us aren't too excited about accepting political reality, but unless the united states undergoes some very serious constitutional change in the near future, we'll just have to get over that. the christian right, certainly a fringe, gained a surprising amount of power in the republican party by proving its loyalty, taking over local organizations, and pressing from within. naderites might have the best intentions in the world; they might be really fucking virtuous and highminded; they might have some sort of visceral aversion to compromise of any sort -- but unless they follow the lead of the christian coalition on this one, they're destroying their own cause and the democrats'.

if nader hadn't run in 2000, al gore would have won and things in this country would be very different today. would they be ideal? HELL NO. al gore is (at the very least, was) a centrist. but maybe we wouldn't be stealing workers' money, distributing it amongst the superrich, and flexing our stupidity muscles all over the world scene.

i feel supremely confident that nader will fail to have any substantive impact upon the campaign -- i don't think he's going to turn it the way he did in '00. also -- because he's not supporting the viable-left party, the viable-left party is going to ignore him. because it ain't a proportional system, he's not going to gain any personal or partisan power. his supporters, rather than pushing a large and established party leftward (as they could if they stuck around), are going to look increasingly radical. who's going to benefit? nobody. great strategy!