Democratic Primaries

On Oct. 13, 2000, 15,000 zealous progressives packed Madison Square Garden for one of Ralph Nader’s super rallies. They paid $20 each for admission, evidence of their passion, since political rallies are almost always free. That year, many on the left were disappointed with the Democratic nominee for president. Al Gore was a wonky centrist and a stilted speaker who appeared to possess few core principles. For progressives, his association with Bill Clinton, icon of triangulation and political compromise, counted against him. At a time when the left was outraged over our corrupt campaign finance system, Gore was dogged by questions about money he’d received from sketchy donors with ties to foreign governments.

At best, Gore offered progressives a continuation of politics as usual. True, the Republican in the race seemed a right-wing buffoon, but Nader told his followers to vote their hopes, not their fears, and his message about citizens banding together to overturn entrenched, amoral corporate interests spoke to many people’s deepest aspirations. Bush and Gore, he said at Madison Square Garden, are “both for cracking down on street crime but ignoring corporate crime, which takes far more lives.” In response, the crowd erupted in chants of “Let Ralph debate!” Young people flocked to Nader, and hip musicians played his rallies: The lineup in New York included Eddie Vedder, Patti Smith, and Ani DiFranco, whose ’90s cool had not yet evanesced.

Nader concluded his almost hourlong speech by calling the evening “the most memorable political rally of the year 2000.” Some who were there felt they were witnessing the flowering of an epochal social movement. “The protest movement that has been growing on a grassroots level, as evidenced by the World Trade Organization demonstrations in Seattle, reached its political coming-of-age last night,” the Village Voice wrote.

At the time, it felt like nothing short of a rebellion against consumer capitalism. Nader had made his name campaigning against the blandishments of corporations, first as a consumer advocate and then as a gadfly political candidate. “Who designed this economy, anyway?” he asked at Madison Square Garden. “I think it’s time to have it designed as if people mattered, not as if General Motors, Exxon, DuPont, and the other corporations matter!”

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Nader’s movement never constituted a real cross section of the left; even sympathetic observers noted that it was overwhelmingly white. After attending another of Nader’s massive rallies in Chicago, Salim Muwakkil wrote in the Chicago Tribune, “This lack of racial diversity among Nader supporters is particularly striking, given the 66-year-old candidate’s progressive positions on economic democracy and social justice.” Yet plenty of people on the left saw Nader as the era’s great political hope. “Nader and the Green Party represent the best opportunity in half a century to place a progressive agenda on the national scene,” wrote Juan Gonzalez in the left-wing magazine In These Times. He added: “It has brought hundreds of thousands of white youth into electoral politics in much the same way that Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition movement brought disaffected blacks to the voting booth in the ’80s.”
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Sixteen years later, supporters of Bernie Sanders would also decry a “media blackout” on coverage of his enormous campaign events. That’s only one of the obvious and striking parallels between the Nader and Sanders campaigns. Both men were gruff, older leftists—Nader, like Sanders, didn’t like kissing strangers’ babies—who became unlikely youth culture heroes. (It helped that both called for free tuition at public colleges.) Nader and Sanders both believed a populist message could draw disaffected nonvoters into the electoral process, promising not just a challenge to the Democratic status quo but a political revolution. In a recent phone interview, Nader called the similarities of his movement and Sanders’ “uncanny.”