To quote Obi-Wan Kenobi’s description of a seedy bar in Star Wars, I often ask myself how and why America has become such a “wretched hive of scum and villainy.”
What or who caused this to happen? Certainly the 77 million voters who re-hired a fascist grifter deserve some of the blame. I’d also pin some on Newt Gingrich, the right-wing hyper-partisan who propelled the Republicans to congressional power in 1994 and taught followers to smear the opposition party as inherently evil. Two years later came the founding of Fox News, with its infauxtainment propaganda for the masses. In the blame game, I could make the case for any or all of those factors.
But not long ago, on a late summer’s morning, I chanced upon a New York Times article about Ralph Nader, who is now 92 and living as a virtual recluse.
Perhaps you’ve forgotten about him. As a legendary consumer advocate, he fought corporate bigwigs and repeatedly beat them. Those padded dashboards and steering wheels and seatbelts that make us safer in cars? Thank Nader. The creation of watchdog bodies like the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, and the passage of the Freedom of Information Act? Thank Nader. He and his public-interest lawyers helped make those happen.
But he has soiled that stellar legacy, irrevocably so. Given what he did during the 2000 presidential campaign – at a pivotal juncture in our national narrative – I have no sympathy for him. If our benighted era has an origin story, Nader arguably authored it.
According to the Times article, he spends his days trying to be relevant. He incessantly phones reporters, academics and elected officials, but he’ll “inevitably bristle when his missives are not received with the enthusiasm or responses they so richly deserve.” Which is a nice way of saying he’s incessantly stonewalled. He lamented to the Times, “The worst thing anybody can experience as a citizen advocate is not getting through.”
Democrats, in particular, banished him long ago to his own private Elba. And I totally get why.
During the 2000 election, Nader decided to run for president as the Green party candidate with the express purpose of pulling lefty voters away from Al Gore. In Nader’s words, Gore was really no different from George W. Bush, therefore liberals needed some place to go, and “we’re going to give them some place to go.” That’s what he told me six months before election night. When I wrote my story, I opened it this way: “Ralph Nader may prove to be Al Gore’s worst nightmare.”
He sure proved it. And the math supports it. In pivotal Florida, the state that swung the Electoral College, Gore lost to Bush by the officially certified margin of 537 votes; meanwhile, Nader pulled 97,488 votes. Two political scientists, from Dartmouth and UCLA, later crunched the numbers and concluded (with the help of exit polls) that roughly 60 percent of the Nader voters would have chosen Gore if Ralph hadn’t run – more than enough for a Democratic victory.
Their conclusion: “Ralph Nader spoiled the 2000 election for Gore.”
As a result, George W. Bush won the opportunity to cement a right-wing Supreme Court with his two appointees, John Roberts and Sam Alito – two key voters in the disastrous 2024 ruling that basically gives presidents carte blanche to do whatever the hell they want in office. Today that is Trump’s gold standard.
If Al Gore had been president, his appointees would never have written in the majority that presidents deserve “absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions within his conclusive and preclusive constitutional authority,” plus “presumptive immunity from prosecution for all his official acts.” And if Gore had crafted the Supreme Court, rest assured women nationwide would still have bodily autonomy under Roe v. Wade.
I visited Nader a few months after that fateful 2000 election and asked him about the abortion issue. He shrugged off the possibility that any Bush nominees would endanger women’s rights. In his words, “Republican operatives tell me, ‘You think we’re going to shatter our party over Roe v. Wade? It’d be like trying to ban alcohol again’.” (Fast forward to 2022: Alito wrote the ruling to overturn Roe. Roberts concurred.)
Today, Nader says he detests Donald Trump and calls him a fascist. But somehow Nader fails to connect the dots, fails to recognize that he helped elect Bush, who in turn cemented the Republican majority on the high court, which in turn excreted the 6-3 ruling that has made it possible for Trump to act as a fascist.
No wonder Nader is on virtually every Democrat’s forever naughty list. It’s tragic a man once so eminent is living out his days as a pariah, relentlessly seeking, in the Times’ words, to “breathe new life into his perpetual state of outrage at the political environment du jour.”
Where’s my violin?
Copyright 2026 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate. Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at [email protected]