The US presidential election takes place on November 7. According to public opinion polls, it's a dead heat between the Republican nominee, Texas Governor George W. Bush, and the Democratic nominee, vice-president Al Gore.
What makes the election interesting, however, is the excitement being generated by the Green Party nominee, Ralph Nader, the prominent consumer advocate. While opinion polls of "likely voters" give Nader only 3% of the national vote, among "not likely" or "first-time voters" his support rises significantly. The latter are mainly college students and young workers in their 20s who are fed up with the RepubliCrats, as Nader calls the two major parties.
Many on the left and most liberals are worried that Nader's success could cost the "lesser evil", Al Gore, the presidency. Since Gore can't win, they say, Nader's votes will lead to a hard-right government that would be a disaster for working people. Vote with your brain, not your heart, is their message.
This concern is warranted if one's framework is that politics begins with elections and what the governments do is based on what the parties say during election campaigns. The truth is the opposite.
Most people in the US who can vote, don't. They feel it doesn't matter. The "X-generation" is the most alienated from status quo politics. They were at the Seattle protests last November and at Nader's rallies.
Anti-corporate politics
Nader's campaign events are phenomenal; they are large organising gatherings for social change.
In a series of volunteer-coordinated large rallies in early October cheered Nader as though he was a rock or hip-hop star. These fundraising events asked attendees for donations of at least $20.
In New York City, 15,000 people attended an October 13 rally at Madison Square Garden. Crowds of 10-12,000 cheered Nader in Portland, Minneapolis, Seattle and Boston.
Some 10,000 people came to the University of Illinois-Pavilion in Chicago on October 10 to hear Nader. "The audience was overwhelmingly young, white and enthusiastic", wrote Patrick in an e-mail account. "Nader delivered a very left, militant, spirited attack on corporate capitalism, even using the term capitalism on several occasions. He also attacked the death penalty, racial profiling and environmental racism. His speech was every bit as worthy as Eugene Debs at Debs' best." (Debs, a socialist, ran for president on the Socialist Party ticket in the early 1900s.)
In other words, we have two presidential campaigns taking place. One involves the major bourgeois parties reported on by the media and Wall Street. The other concerns the "unlikely voters", mainly newly radicalised young people (mostly white) who are inspired by Nader's anti-corporate message. The latter campaign is not widely publicised by the big business media, but it is new and possibly more significant.
Lesser evil
The fact that traditional supporters of many of Nader's public citizen efforts are strongly attacking his campaign raises once again the issue of "lesser evilism" as a strategy to defend working people when no mass alternative to the capitalist parties exist.
The main problem with this argument is the false belief that social change starts with electoral politics. That has never been true.
On the other hand, there is no working-class party that can win today; one of the two major bourgeois parties' candidates will be elected. Therefore, it is accurate to say there is a "lesser evil" in bourgeois politics.
The question is: should we care?
There are social constituencies that are more right-wing than others which back Bush. The Republican Party is more and more a party of mainly white, Christian fundamentalists, big business bosses and white workers who oppose "special rights" for minorities, women and gays.
The hard-core of the Democratic Party are union workers, civil rights and women's rights leaders, and African Americans, Latinos and Asian Americans. They tend to be more liberal.
But both parties are anti-working class and pro-imperialist. On foreign policy, Gore and Bush's policies are similar (for example, both strongly back the Israeli regime against the Palestinian people).
The issue of lesser evilism is about the relative but real domestic differences about how the capitalists rule over working people. And what the parties do in government is determined, not by their platforms or what they say in speeches, but by the level of working-class resistance.
Politics starts in streets
Independent working-class politics doesn't begin with elections. It begins in the streets: extra parliamentary actions. It begins with mass public campaigns. The protests against capitalist globalisation in Seattle, Washington, Melbourne and Prague are examples of real politics.
All major changes in US history began outside of elections; they were forced upon the capitalist rulers and their parties. The most recent examples include the mass struggles that led to the end of legal segregation in the 1960s and to the withdrawal of the US military from Vietnam in the early 1970s.
The courts and other capitalist institutions rarely initiate change. They respond to what working people and others do.
The main significance of the Nader campaign is that it isn't primarily an electoral campaign. Nader explains that his campaign for democracy and against the two-party duopoly will continue after the election. The aim is to build an alternative 365 days a year, to build a broad-based citizen movement for fundamental change.
The mistake of some leftists who use fear of the right to justify their support for lesser evilism is that they miss the political dynamic of the Nader presidential campaign and similar state and local Green Party campaigns. If Nader gets 5-10% of the vote nationally, or in many states, the impact on politics could be tremendous. It could energise tens of thousands of people to act for their interests.
The Nader campaign, in that sense, has already won. It's begun to raise political consciousness and inspire many alienated young people to join struggles against capitalist globalisation and for world peace, and to actively support social issues. These youth are the basis for a new left.
@auth= BY MALIK MIAH