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The Philosophical Basis of Nader’s Politics
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The Philosophical Basis of Nader’s Politics"In a democracy, the highest office is the office of citizen." —Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter Ralph Nader is not a philosopher. In fact, he seems to have an inherent distrust of academic intellectuals (not a hostility, simply a distrust), based on their tendency towards theory at the expense of action. He is also not a “radical revolutionary,” despite the best efforts of conservatives and moderates to paint him as such. Nader’s philosophy can be summed up as “citizen empowerment,” and as such, draws upon the American political tradition in much the same way as any social movement. There are two basic philosophical premises behind Nader’s politics. First, in a democracy, the people are the ultimate authorities. This is Jeffersonian democracy at its most extreme, but, as the quotation below explains, it is also a contemporary application of Jeffersonian democracy to conditions he and the other founders could not necessarily have foreseen: The inspiration came directly from Thomas Jefferson, who had written, "I know of no safer depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves." But Jefferson, of course, could not have envisioned how moneyed special interests, official secrecy, procedural complexities and the brute size of the nation would erode the sinews of government accountability. Nor could James Madison, author of the famous Federalist No. 10 essay, have predicted how competing special-interest factions might not yield the public good, contrary to his predictions. The creation of a citizens' lobby to represent the people as a whole -- "the public interest" -- was a bold, innovative development in American politics at the time. It represented a creative attempt to reclaim Jefferson's faith in "the people themselves." John Gardner, a former Secretary of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, would have a similar idea in 1970, when he founded Common Cause, a good government lobby that focused primarily on procedural reforms such as campaign finance reform and government ethics. (http://www.nader.org/history/bollier_chapter_3.html) Nader’s second philosophical premise is that power tends to corrupt unless it is checked by a wide array of citizens. This is why it is grossly over simplistic to view Nader as merely a proponent of greater government control, indistinguishable from typical liberal democrats. Nader believes that ordinary people must make both corporations and governments more accountable. Why, then, should corporations be held to the same standard as politicians? There are several sensible reasons for this. First and most importantly, the democratic "experiment" is about checking excessive power. Corporations have as much power as, and frequently more power than, any elected or appointed political leader. They can control resources and make large-scale decisions about production and distribution. They can make decisions that have far-reaching environmental and economic effects, sometimes stretching centuries into the future. And, most recently, the multinational status of many corporations makes them, literally, "above" the laws of most nations. Second, the kinds of "checks" which defenders of corporate power claim exist are not really effective. The classic argument is that citizens "vote with their dollars." Aside from the fact that this means people with a million dollars get a million votes, Such an argument assumes what many capitalist apologists assume without proof: that citizens possess near-perfect information about public and private transactions and the effects of corporate decisions. Since most corporate decisions are made behind closed doors, and since advertising does not normally reveal the truth about the production process, citizens do not have the kind of information that voters in political elections possess. Finally, checks must exist on corporate power because the classic individualist metaphors of entrepreneurship and hard work hardly do justice to the corporate juggernauts. Wealth is not generated through the individual actions of individual innovators; rather, wealth is a social creation: capitalists need laborers, sellers need consumers, and the resources extracted from the earth do not belong to any one individual in some a priori sense. So corporations need to be accountable because corporations could, literally, not exist without the collective masses that sustain them. All of these reasons provide sound philosophical justification for an increased watchdog role on the part of concerned citizens. Some less-than-eloquent critics have, over the past few decades, referred to Nader as an anti-capitalist, a communist, a socialist, even a Stalinist. Nader is none of these. He does not call for the end of corporations or market economies. In fact, many on the anti-capitalist left see Nader as wanting to "save" corporations and capitalism by forcing reforms that smart corporate executives would favor as a way to make themselves look better. Nader’s Political Principles“When I was in law school, we had a joke that at Harvard they teach you how to distort the law of contracts and contract the law of torts. Little did I know then that in 1999 this very thing would be occurring. We are losing the two great pillars of American law, torts and contracts, to institutionalized, giant corporations. Corporate law firms are composed of lawyers who have forgotten what it means to be a professional and who are themselves losing their independence. They are not heeding the warnings of Justice Louis Brandis and Henry Stimpson and Ella Herue, who warned about corporate law firms losing their independence to corporate clients by becoming mere adjuncts to the corporation's priorities.” –Nader, WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY JOURNAL OF LAW AND POLICY, 1999, p. 56
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