Ralph Nader: “The choice is between Trump’s fascism and Harris’ autocracy”

On the last day of the Democratic National Convention in 1968, Gore Vidal remarked to a party chairman: “Perhaps the only thing that can save us is a president who is not a politician.”

“Who were you thinking of?” they asked.

“Ralph Nader,” said Vidal.

In 1969, Nader was a lawyer in his mid-thirties known for his exposés on safety standards in the automobile industry and for being followed by General Motors' private investigators. His meticulous advocacy for consumers soon earned him the cover of TimeHosting Saturday Night Liveand chat about seat belt design and “stronger passenger compartment shells” on Dick Cavett’s talk show. In 2006 he played in the Atlanticis the 100 most influential people in American history, ahead of Herman Melville, Booker T. Washington and Richard Nixon. His entry reads: “He made the cars we drive safer; Thirty years later he made George W. Bush president.”

Nader is now the groundbreaking third-party candidate in the United States. As a Green Party candidate in 1996, he switched from consumerism to presidential politics, his first of four bids for the White House. But it was the 2000 contest that led to then-Senator Joe Biden banning him from the Capitol hallways with the remark, “Nader cost us the election.” For Biden, it was simple math. Democratic candidate Al Gore lost Florida by 537 votes; in Florida, Nader reached 97,488. Nader's name still inspires scorn in liberal dining rooms in Washington.

Today he defends himself by saying that Gore should have been a better candidate; The solution is not for everyone who disagrees with the two major parties to banish themselves from electoral democracy. “The Democrats are always looking for scapegoats now,” he told me over the phone from his home in Washington, DC. Kamala Harris' campaign is already blaming the Green Party candidate for a Donald Trump victory, he noted. A Democratic billboard in swing states reads: “Jill Stein once helped Trump. Don’t let her do that again.”

“They are preparing to use this tiny Green Party as a scapegoat if they fail to defeat the worst Republican Party in history,” Nader said. Trump's GOP is “cruel, mean, power-hungry, imperial, demonstrably anti-worker, anti-child – has blocked the expansion of the child tax, for example – misogynistic – Trump is a huge misogynist – fanatically anti-immigrant and ready to somersault the entire government.” to put Wall Street in a humiliating position. If you can’t turn a party like that into a landslide like FDR and Truman, you have to look for scapegoats.”

Nader says Harris' message is “narrow, boring and outrageously monotonous.” More progressive economic policies like raising the minimum wage are key to defeating the Republicans. “25 million workers earn between $7.25 and $15 an hour,” Nader said. “You raise it to $15 an hour, which is low by European standards, and you answer the question of low-wage workers: 'Why should I vote?'” Nader even has a slogan to accompany the policy: “Vote for a raise – you've earned it a long time ago.” He continued: “Then they can make it authentic…by campaigning across the country actually upholding the bill that would be passed in Congress if they won.”

Despite Nader's skepticism, corporatism is not pervasive in the Democratic Party: an assertive antitrust movement has emerged, fighting against monopolistic companies like Microsoft and Google. Although both approaches are often critical of corporations, Nader's consumer behavior is not as compatible with the instincts of antitrust law as it might initially seem. Antitrust advocates such as Barry C. Lynn have argued that companies can treat their workers poorly in order to keep prices low for consumers. Nader praises leading anti-trust icon, young Federal Trade Commission lawyer Lina Khan, as “very good.” “She is the best leader since Michael Pertschuk in 1980 under Carter.” However, he doubts that the movement can have a lasting impact. “The Federal Trade Commission has a smaller budget than a large corporate law firm,” he claimed. “It's just a tiny little … promising bright spot on our horizon that can be extinguished by a single act of Congress – a corporate Congress.”

Nader is pessimistic about the future. He wouldn't reveal how he plans to vote, but he clearly believes Trump is the biggest threat. He called the election a “contest between (the) fascism of Trump and (the) autocracy of Harris in a two-party duopoly.” (He told this last year Washington Post: “Autocracy leaves a gap. They don’t suppress voices. They do not suppress free speech.”)

Splitting the two-party duopoly was a defining mission of Nader's life; it has also led him to some unusual bedfellows. Ross Perot's centrist Reform Party endorsed Nader in 2004, four years after Donald Trump filed for president. In 2015, Nader praised Trump for not ruling out running as a third-party candidate, saying he would be a “nightmare for the Republican corporate establishment.”

Robert F. Kennedy Junior, who ran against Biden for the Democratic nomination this year before running as an independent, was the nation's most successful third-party candidate in decades. In July, polls showed him at around 15 percent. Kennedy, a former environmental lawyer, railed against corporate capture but was stopped in his tracks by conspiracies about vaccines. After Biden dropped out of the race, RFK lost support for Harris, falling to 7 percent. “He made a lot of political mistakes,” Nader said. “He has these conspiratorial cockamamie theories that obscure his previous strong criticism of the pharmaceutical industry,” adding that he “ended up supporting Trump and asking for a Cabinet position – a sad number.”

Kennedy attacked the Democratic Party for supporting censorship and foreign interventionism. He portrayed himself as a fighter against an inscrutable, nefarious establishment. Does Nader think that the skepticism of authority once reserved for the left is now more common on the right? “This is what I call the false populism of generic corporatists. They'll talk about immigrants taking jobs, and they'll talk about Democrats being out of touch with workers. But when push comes to shove, they are hardcore corporatists.”

“The overall problem here is corporate supremacy over everything,” Nader said. He recalled Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1938 letter to Congress in which he wrote: “The freedom of a democracy is not secure if the people tolerate the growth of private power to the point where it becomes stronger than you democratic state itself.” This is essentially fascism – ownership of the government by an individual, group or other controlling private power.” Trump, Nader believes, has provided “heaps of evidence that he wants to be a dictator.” He pointed to recent comments by former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, who served under Trump, that his boss was a “fascist.”

Is that a reason to vote for Harris? “Yeah – I mean, if your relatives weren’t getting killed in Palestine and Lebanon, you wouldn’t care and vote for Harris.”

Does he think democracy will survive? “No, of course not.”

Throughout our conversation, the 90-year-old was as fluent and sharp as he was on Cavett's television show in the 1970s. He published two books this year, including a collection of essays, Out of the darkness. Next year, Civic self-respecta handbook for the aspiring good citizen, is published.

Ralph Nader shows no signs of slowing down. But he has already thought about what he wants his legacy to be: “On the one hand, I spent a lot of time talking to reporters and trying to inform them. The second is that one person can make a difference. Third, satisfaction in life is greatly enhanced by the fight for a fairer world. The fourth point is that any consent that holds societies together begins with protecting dissent.”

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