Nader goes around the bend: is the anti-corporate crusader so left he's almost right?

AuthorCarney, Timothy P.
PositionUnstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State - Book review

Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State, by Ralph Nader, Nation Books, 240 pages, $25.99

Ralph Nader, the legendary anti-corporate crusader, is the father of many regulations and even more nonprofit advocacy groups. How odd that this liberal hero has authored a book that lavishes praise on right-wing stalwart Pat Buchanan and approvingly cites Grover Norquist, George F. Will, and the Cato Institute.

In Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State, Nader lays out an agenda to bring together conservatives, libertarians, and liberals in the battle against corporate welfare, rampant surveillance, and the military-industrial complex.

At its best, Unstoppable is a wonkish rallying cry for a much needed left-right convergence against the corrupt corporatist center. At its worst, the book is an object lesson in the deep-seated impediments to any such coalition.

The heart of Unstoppable is a 25-point agenda for left-right convergence. But Nader's sense of what is plausibly appealing to conservatives and libertarians can be a bit off-kilter. Auditing the Defense Department, curbing corporate welfare, reforming taxes, and breaking up "too big to fail" banks--all of these could certainly find cross-ideological agreement. Indexing the minimum wage to inflation is less likely to meet with a warm reception among non-Democrats. Nader, for all his outsider status, is a deeply political creature. And in classic Naderite fashion, most of his 25 prescriptions are political reforms rather than policy proposals. Some of them are very good. He wants to give taxpayers standing to sue in courts, "push community self-reliance," "defend and extend civil liberties," and rein in presidential war powers.

Unstoppable accurately diagnoses some of the venality of today's politics, including corruption on the right. Nader winningly groups problems under the labels of "corporatism" and "corporate/statism." He praises principled conservatives and libertarians, and points out how "conservatism" is often abused and twisted to serve the powerful. "The corporatist Republicans let the libertarians and conservatives have the paper platforms," but then they "throw out a welcome mat for Big Business lobbyists with their slush funds who are anything but libertarian or conservative in their demands." I couldn't have said it any better.

One sharp observation is how conservative rhetoric is used to advance stultifying pro-incumbent economic policies. "Since established ways and institutions usually reflect the existing distribution of power, wealth, and property," he writes, "conservatism has been associated with societies where the few dominate the many, ultimately through the use of the police force when all other silent and overt repressions...

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