Re: Stop it! [was Re: ergonomics, etc.]

[Brad DeLong <delong@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> We picked up our daughter yesterday.  I am just now of wading through a
> ton of e-mail.
>
> The tone of this thread is pretty bad.  Too much noise relative to the
> signal.  It's too late to point fingers at its origins.
>
> So for now let us just stop it.  No more recriminations.
>
> Canada is bad.  Nader is bad.  The working-class is bad.
>
> I don't think anybody on this list (with one exception) thinks that Bush
> or the Republicans would do a better job than Gore and his crew in terms
> of this sort of policies that have been enacted so far.  The rationale
> for supporting Nader seemed to be an effort to stop the rightward drift.

No. There were four rationales for Nader:

--(1) that the Nader campaign would gain extraordinary support and
provide a breakthrough into a new, more fluid politics of possibility
by destroying two-party gridlock...

--(2) that the Nader campaign would demonstrate the strength of the
left, and convince the DLC types that there were more votes to be
gained by going hunting on the left than by making additional
accomodations in the center...

--(3) that this could be accomplished without running any significant
risk of throwing the election to Bush...

--(4) that worrying about throwing the election to Bush--"lesser
evilism"--was contemptible, because there was not a dime's worth of
difference between Bush and Gore.

I don't know about you, but I heard (and read) a lot of these four
reasons for much of last fall. Now I don't hear much of (1), (2), and
(3). As far as (1) and (2) are concerned, Nader's 3% of the vote was
not impressive by the scale of other insurgent efforts like Perot,
Anderson, and Wallace. Thus there has been no breakthrough via the
destruction of two-party gridlock, and the DLC remains enormously
unimpressed. It is only here that I read *anyone* making claim (3).

And so I think that is important to point out that (4) is not
correct. That there are significant and important differences in
workplace policy, labor policy, judicial appointments, environmental
policy, tax policy, foreign policy, and so forth between Bush and
Gore. I want the people who claimed that there was not a dime's worth
of difference between Bush and Gore to count up their change, and not
to go into total denial as far as the stakes we lost last fall are
concerned.

If it were just a question of their going into denial, and by
forgetting history being condemned to repeat it, I would not care so
much. But I fear that they are going to try to make me repeat it with
them.


Brad DeLong