Anti-Climacus

QUOTES: From the aforementioned review by Jon Chait:

"The most hilarious evidence of Nader's stratospheric self-regard is his frequent insistence to the contrary. He fills his memoir with anecdotes of others offering him praise, and of himself demurring. He takes enormous pride in his humility. "Running for president requires a level and intensity of political ego that I do not find congenial," he writes at one point. Two paragraphs later, he recalls, "Friends chided me for rarely mentioning the achievements that I have registered over the years."...

The answer is that Nader's kamikaze effort against the Democrats was not as out of character as his anguished former allies supposed. There was a brief period in our political culture when a character such as Nader was able to produce an astonishing array of political triumphs. But his paranoia and irrationality, contempt for nuance and savaging of allies were there all along. Deliberately helping to elect Bush was in some ways a betrayal of Naderism, but in other ways its apotheosis. Whereas once Nader's style served the cause of social progress, it now serves the opposite.

Perhaps the most interesting question is how Nader's destructive accomplishments stack up against his constructive ones. We cannot know the answer to this question until the current administration departs office, but Bush will probably do more to set the country back than Nader did to move it forward. In weighing Nader's social-activist legacy against his Bush-electing legacy, one thing to keep in mind is that the former is more historically inevitable than the latter. If not for Nader, somebody else would have put seatbelts in cars; nobody else would have thrown the presidency to Bush.

Nader likely would respond, as he has frequently, that Bush's achievements will inevitably backfire as they provoke a massive popular reaction. But the existence of such a progressive revival remains largely speculative for now. And let us not forget that Nader's achievements did galvanize a massive reaction from business, which, largely in response to Nader and his movement, organized itself into a potent political force that dominates Washington to this day. If we are to subtract from Bush's achievements the hypothetical progressive backlash it will bring about, then we must discount from Nader's achievements the actual conservative backlash it did bring about. However one figures it, the conclusion is the same: When it comes time to write Nader's political obituary, the three-word headline will be, "He elected Bush."