LONDON, 18 August 2004 — This is the question which people ask themselves before almost every presidential election: Why, when the United States is teeming with brilliant and inspiring people, are its voters so often faced with a choice between two deeply unimpressive men? I would have thought the answer was pretty obvious: Because deeply unimpressive men continue to be elected.
This year, the American people have been instructed to elect one again. Almost every powerful progressive voice has told them not to vote for the progressive candidate, but to vote instead for The Man Who Isn’t There. Ralph Nader may stand for everything the Guardian, the Nation magazine, even Noam Chomsky, claim to support, but all these voices — indeed just about everyone on the left — have been urging the voters in swing states to choose John Kerry.
Their argument, of course, is that Kerry is the only candidate who can knock George Bush off his perch. He might be about as inspiring as a parking lot on a wet Sunday in Detroit, but his vacuity is better than the president’s aggressive certainties.
And their argument has merit. Bush has already launched two unnecessary wars, threatened 40 or 50 nations with armed aggression, ripped up international treaties and domestic regulations, granted corporations a license to cook the planet, waged a global war against civil liberties and sought to bury that old-fashioned notion that the state should tax the rich and help the poor. The world would certainly be a safer and a better place without him.
As a result, a Guardian leader told us last week, these are “exceptional circumstances ... Kerry’s flaws and limitations are evident; but they are put in the shade by the neoconservative agenda and catastrophic war-making of Bush”.
Under the US electoral system, which is constructed around patronage, corruption and fear of the media, there will always be exceptional circumstances, because it will always throw up dreadful candidates. Only when the Americans choose a man or woman who is prepared to turn the system upside down and reintroduce democracy to the greatest democracy on earth will these exceptional circumstances come to an end.
Any president who seeks to change this system requires tremendous political courage. He needs to take on the corporations which have bought the elections, and challenge the newspapers and television stations which set the limits of political debate. Kerry, who demonstrated plenty of courage in Vietnam, has shown none whatsoever on the presidential stump. Last week, when the Republicans were questioning his commitment to defense, he announced that “even knowing what we now know” he would have voted to give President Bush the authority to attack Iraq.
Kerry’s ability to raise almost as much money as the Republicans is seen as a triumph for American democracy; but his corporate backers are funding him not because they believe in democracy, but because they believe that he will do what they want.
The idea that this frightened, flinching man would oversee the necessary democratic revolution is preposterous. He has made the system work for him by working for the system. He knows that as soon as he turns against it, it will destroy him. What else does he have to fall back on? Charisma? Popular enthusiasm? He’s no Hugo Chavez. A vote for Kerry is not just a vote against George Bush. It is a vote for the survival of the system which made Bush happen.
I’m not an unhesitating fan of Ralph Nader’s — I believe that some of his positions on trade, for example, are wrong — but no one could deny that he possesses courage. His decision to stand in November, when even his former supporters are telling him not to, is as brave as it is foolhardy. He has spent his working life fighting the corporations and being attacked in the media. This month he did something no other US politician has dared to do, and took on the Anti-Defamation League, the organization which smears opponents of Israeli policy as anti-Semites. He won’t be elected in November, of course, but that’s not the point. The point is that if you want to change a system, you have to start now, rather than in some endlessly deferred future. And the better Nader does, the faster the campaign for change will grow.
None of this is to suggest that there is no difference between Kerry and Bush. The question is whether this difference is sufficient to justify the abandonment of the only current electoral attempt to democratize the US political system. I don’t believe it is. Progressives on both sides of the Atlantic are asking American voters to sacrifice liberty for security, and democracy for expediency. The voters should ignore them.
