Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Sunday, May 22, 2016

The Usual Suspects: Ben from Ben & Jerry's, Susan Sarandon, Cornel West, and Tim Robbins for Nader in 2000

Tired of voting for the lesser of two evils, no difference between secular pluralist environmentalist Al Gore or vapid belligerent plutocratic George W. Bush, no difference between the corrupt parties, hold Democrats to account, heighten the contradictions, blah blah blah blah...


The point of posting this video is not the facile one which singularly blames Nader for Gore losing the 2000 election and unleashing unquestionably the worst most catastrophic Presidency of a generation. I say this because Gore didn't lose the election. Gore won the election and then Republican appointees on the Supreme Court abetted a putsch. The point is that these arguments were objectively wrong. They revealed an indifference to differences that make a difference that exposes privilege not righteousness. They mistake the clarity of logical advocacy or passionate agitation for an ideal position for the compromised work through which progress toward better policies are accomplished and maintained. They mis-educated and mislead millions of people about distinctions that urgently mattered and demoralized majorities about real possibilities for change when people organize and struggle, solving shared problems through legislation and pushing our sense of the possible and the important from movements on the ground. The stomach churning thing about this Nader video is not just that so many of the faces have not changed in the fauxvolutionary epoch of the Bernie Brigade but that, word for word, their arguments have not changed to reflect the evidence and experience of the collective disaster of the first decade of this century, a disaster from which the nation has not yet recovered, a failure to recover which leaves us as planetary peers radically unprepared for the challenge of climate catastrophe which is already reshaping the world and history in the image of disaster.

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