A Portrait of the Crusader as a Young Man
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MJ: But what’s next, since being a spoiler is inherently a short-term strategy?
RN: It’s not spoiling. A spoiler is a kind of contemptuous word, first of all, because it speaks of a kind of political bigotry. What you should call it is the power of a humanizer of politics. That’s the way I see it. Isn’t it easy to say that the Democrats should take poll-tested issues that might get them less cash but more votes with the American people?
MJ:: In the film, it’s interesting to see the sheer number of former allies who either asked you not to run or wished you hadn’t. Was there anyone whose opposition to your running in ’04 made you the least bit hesitant?
RN: Howard Zinn and [Noam] Chomsky—just in the close states. In October [2004] they signed a letter with 70 others, which basically said I should focus on getting more votes in the safe states. But we were running a 50-state campaign. We didn’t prefer one state to another, except I certainly did in California compared to Florida. I spent 28 there, and 2.5 days in Florida in 2000.
MJ: When the Atlantic Monthy recently named you one of the 100 most influential figures in American history, it wrote, “He made the cars we drive safer; thirty years later, he made George W. Bush the president.” You say in the film that you don’t care about your legacy. Do you really feel that way?
RN: I would only care if they showed that I was wrong—that I hoisted some deception on people. It is so grotesque for the Atlantic to say something like that. Just empirically, let’s see who made George Bush president before I did: Al Gore by running a terrible campaign, George W. Bush for stealing the campaign, and David McReynolds—he got 3,700 votes for Socialist Labor. A quarter of a million Democrats voted for Bush. Why are my critics picking on just one of the “what-ifs”?
MJ: Speaking of what-ifs, John Kerry has a forthcoming book One Moment on Earth. Al Gore has An Inconvenient Truth. What do you think it is about losing a presidential election that makes Democrats lean green?
RN: I think they have suppressed themselves for so long. Gore suppressed himself for eight years. He wrote an environmental book in 1992, and then all of a sudden Clinton muzzled him. We couldn’t get him to make one speech on solar or renewable energy, and it’s not because we didn’t ask. Not a single proposal to raise fuel efficiency in motor vehicles after he writes a book that says the internal combustion engine is a global menace. Now he is liberated.
With Kerry, I think he looks at Gore. It gives both of them a frame of reference that has tinges of statesmanship to it. It lets them look out for the whole world. Then there is being au courant. You go to Beverley Hills and New York to raise money and that’s what’s on people’s minds, not asbestos nor asthma in the ghettos, not lead contamination coming off crumbling tenement walls. It’s a stratospheric fashion now. To test their authenticity is to ask how many times they use proper names, excoriating corporate environmental predators, rather than just vague generalities.
MJ: You are famous for saying “The only true aging is the erosion of one’s ideals,” but you have also been accused by those like Roger Hickey of “bedazzling young people, with a self-serving and oversimplified political message,” retiring to comfortable liberal strongholds rather than engaging in the task of building a political majority.
RN: When have I ever suggested retiring to comfortable liberal strongholds? Gee, all those abolitionists—they were tempting and tantalizing the youth of those days to retire to comfortable strongholds—all those people who struggled for labor, and Farmer Progressive, and the Greenback Party, and the People’s Party, and the Liberty Party. Are you saying they were just pie in the sky?
The progress of history is to take the impossible and turn it into the possible. It’s impossible to beat the tobacco industry, to have no smoking on airplanes. It happened. It was supposed to be impossible to have an arms accord with the Soviet Union where we watch each other dismantling nuclear warheads. The whole story of human history is: The blasphemy of today is the commonplace of tomorrow. These guys have aged before they hit 70.
MJ: Now that you are almost 73, do you still have time to read Mother Jones?
RN: Yeah, I still read it. We get it in the library, but I wish you would call me once in a while for ideas.
Koshlan Mayer-Blackwell is a Mother Jones editorial fellow.
