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Contributors
Steven Hayward- Contributor
[Courtesty of Pacific Research
Institute]
Dr. Steven
Hayward is Senior Fellow in Environmental Studies for the Pacific
Research Institute. He
is also nationally recognized for his recently released book, The
Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Old Liberal Order 1964-1980 (Prima
Publishing, 2001), and Churchill on Leadership: Executive
Success in the Face of Adversity (Prima Publishing, 1997).
[go to Hayward index]
 The "Violence
of Egotism"
...and
the Strange Case of Ralph Nader...
[Steven Hayward] 3/5/04
Ralph
Nader's utterly predictable announcement that he will indeed
run for president again as an independent
candidate summons forth a certain amount of schadenfreude among
Republicans, as well it should. After all, it was liberal Democrats,
along with a fawning and credulous media, that swelled Nader's
fame beyond all legitimate proportion back in the 1960s and 1970s.
In those heady days of regnant liberalism, the surest way for
an ambitious chairman of the House Subcommittee on Lawn Chair
Design was to invite Mr. Nader to a hearing to excoriate the
flimsiness of chaise lounges beneath the klieg lights of the
TV cameras, with lawsuit to follow. It is, therefore, only cosmic
justice that Nader should have cost the Democrats a national
election as he arguably did in 2000.
Democrats have only themselves to blame for the Nader hydra.
Yet there is something more than a little pathetic about Nader's
latest run, namely, the reflection on how far he has fallen.
At one point in the late 1960s and 1970s Nader's national popularity
was such that he routinely ranked high in opinion polls as a
favorite choice for president. Had he run for office as a Democratic
candidate in the 1970s, he might have gone far. Indeed, such
was Nader's reputation that in 1976 President-elect Jimmy Carter
invited him to Plains, Georgia for several hours of talks about
government reform. It is doubtful that John Kerry would today
invite Nader to drop by for any other purpose than fitting him
with a pair of cement shoes.
Kerry needn't worry much. It is doubtful Nader will get even
one percent of the vote this year (he got about three percent
in 2000), and most of those will be votes that would otherwise
be cast as write-ins for Noam Chomsky.
The appeal
of Nader was always that he somehow stood above or beyond politics,
that he was somehow a better or more virtuous
person than the power- and attention-grubbing partisan politicians
that fill up the public stage. But increasingly Nader looks like
the worst of a partisan politician - partisan for only himself
- without the mitigating virtue of partisan accountability. New
Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson (a possible Kerry running mate) rightly
called Nader's new run "an act of total vanity and ego satisfaction."
Here the
words of Henry Adams come to mind: "The effect
of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self;
a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim's sympathies;
a diseased appetite, like a passion for drink or perverted tastes;
one can scarcely use expressions too strong to describe the violence
of egotism it stimulates."
In other
words, Nader has succumbed to the personal corruption of his
own massive
publicity and power in much the same way as
an ordinary politician. The lesson is that you don't have to
be elected to office in order to succumb to the political disease-an "activist" can
be afflicted just as severely. CRO
copyright
2004 Pacific Research Institute
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