I've been thinking about these issues for a number of weeks and haven't posted on them because they seem so obvious. But given some of the discussions going on around here--such as about Kerry's "liberalism"--I'm going to give up and post these thoughts. I apologize in advance if this is insulting.
It seems like political observers--including pundits, party members, and a lot of people here--conflate the terms liberal and conservative and democratic and what I'll call representative. The best recent example is Dean. Dean is not a "liberal" of the 70s type, but anyone who didn't follow him closely wouldn't know it. Rather, Dean is a moderate, one who embraces democracy wholeheartedly, at least as embodied in his presidential run this year. Kerry, by contrast, is a liberal according to many (but by no means all) measures. But he supports representative government, which I think made him look more "conservative" than Dean in the primary. I had a distinct feeling, for example, that a lot of Iowans I talked to were scared by Dean's democratic message.
Now there are a whole lot of details that muddy this distinction (such as Dean's largely socially liberal stances balanced by his fiscally moderate ones, or Edwards' populist appeal that belies his more conservative voting record). But I think we need to focus more attention on this distinction, for several reasons.
Why do we need to maintain this distinction?
First of all, a lot of people (I count myself as one of them) base their political support primarily on the democratic/representative axis, rather than the liberal/conservative one. In my own case, I voted for McCain in the 2000 primary (in MI, so it was a winning vote) not because I wanted to mess with Bush, but because McCain was by far the most "democratic" candidate of the three legitimate candidates at that point: Gore, Bush, McCain. Now I know that McCain is a real conservative. I know he espouses a lot of values that I can't abide by. But I also know that, because he is such a practitioner of democracy, he has moderated his views of late to get behind really important issues. There is a reason he has voted with the D's on many of the most important votes of late, and it isn't shared policy views (liberal v. conservative). It is a belief about the way this country ought to be run (democratic v. representative), and a use of his vote to support that belief.
This issue is really important to the discussions about Nader, too. For those of us who believe that democratic process matters more than ideology, the issue is urgent. Quite honestly, if we don't fix campaign finance, if we don't fix the media, if we don't minimize corporate lobbyist influence on policy, it doesn't matter who is president. This country will be sunk in any case. Bush's conservative policy is disastrous, but his anti-democratic stance is really just a continuation and intensification of a trend, and that trend is not going to entirely disappear with a Kerry presidency. It will be reversed, but it will still be an urgent urgent problem.
So as people try to figure out what to do about Nader, they need to realize that one of his primary appeals is his espoused belief in the process of democracy. (This is one of the reasons why appeals to Supreme Court judge selection, environmental policy, and international policy don't work for some Nader voters--you're not addressing the core issue.) Now I for one will vote Kerry one way or another this year, but I do respect the urgency of the people who want to make our government more democratic again. I think the anti-Nader discussions would be a lot more productive if they also acknowledged and addressed the urgency of the process issues Nader is trying (if in a wrong-headed method) to highlight. Instead, they're often dismissed as an issue of degrees of liberalism (progressive v. liberal, as opposed to democratic v. representative. I feel like the anti-Nader people are screaming, "DON'T YOU GET IT, IT'S AN ISSUE OF (liberal v. conservative) LIFE OR DEATH!" while the Nader people are tying to say, "DON'T YOU GET IT, THE REAL LIFE OR DEATH ISSUE IS DEMOCRATIC v. REPRESENTATIVE!"
Finally, I think we need to be more attentive to this distinction because it will result in more nuanced political discussions (and hopefully, solutions). There are a lot of people in this country, both liberal and conservative, who would get behind a move to make this country more democratic. But we undermine such a possible movement by pretending the central issue is one of left v. right.