Recently I struck up a conversation with a person who insisted that Ralph Nader is a saint. No, not of the religious persuasion, but a man with holy ideals, a man worth voting for no-matter-what !
I consider myself an idealist and have a fully formed political ideology around guaranteeing the rights of equal opportunity and pursuit of happiness within the bounds of responsibility; things hinted at, but not really covered in our current incarnation of the U.S. Constitution. And in many ways Ralph Nader's platform comes closest to my own beliefs about government:
- Single payer health care, no insurance company mark-ups thank you very much.
- Get out of Iraq within 6 months, period. Say our apologies for the previous fucked up regime and sic the U.N. (for what it's worth) on the issue.
- Promote a strong public education system with equal opportunities for all students
- Get corporations out of politics. Prosecute corporate crime. Tax stock market speculation profits as straight income (just like gambling, which it is).
- Impeach BushCo.
- Move aggressively to renewable (non-biofuel) energy resources (more-so than Obama's tepid though better than the last, oh, 28 years of energy policy).
- Instant runoff voting (IRV) with 50% majority required to win (why do we have a "national" leader with less than 50% support?)
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So I have a certain amount of empathy with this person as we continue our conversation....
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Without a runoff election process that independents desire, how, I asked this person, how do you justify Ralph Nader's arrogance, his utter disdain for the real differences between the Republican and Democratic parties? Don't you realize that Ralph once had a lot of cheerleaders in the Democratic party, and he pissed away their good will by helping to submarine Al Gore in 2000? Pissed them off so badly that you can barely mention his name!
"Ralph's a genius. And Al Gore was ripped off by the Florida voting system, not by Nader. It wasn't his fault!"
I pointed out that despite all of the other irregularities, the Florida vote would very likely have been clear-cut for Gore had Nader not syphoned off some of the independent/Democratic votes.
"Not voting for the person with the best ideas is a betrayal of one's principles," was the response of certainty; mixed with a tinge of paranoia, "The fix was in, Gore was to lose Florida, period, Nader or no."
Ignoring the paranoia that underpinned the belief, I pressed on: In a close election where your vote could lead to the election of a person who is clearly the furthest away from your ideals, when you know for a fact that your candidate will not win, you take no responsibility for the fact that you have in fact voted FOR the lesser candidate by voting your "ideals"? That because of your mindset we got BushCo and a nightmare presidency. And because of your candidate's arrogance, it's made his platform much more difficult to be heard?
"Oh, that thinking is just so anti-intellectual..."
I walked away scratching my head, and drove off into the desert to commune with my ideals.
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p.s., read mindgeek's excellent diary on the neuroscience of acquiring beliefs, it helped me understand this person's thought process a little better than I had before.