The monthly interview.

AuthorNoah, Timothy
PositionTEN MILES SQUARE - Interview

In his new book, Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State, the consumer advocate and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader argues that on many issues, from undeclared wars to unprosecuted Wall Street crimes, liberal and conservative citizens increasingly agree with each other, and that, by working together, they can take back Washington. After Washington Monthly contributing editor Timothy Noah wrote a respectful, if skeptical, review of Nader's book for the Washington Post, we asked him to sit down with Nader for a wide-ranging interview. Here's an edited version of that conversation.

Tim Noah: This is a very polarized moment in American politics. Can we expect politicians to bargain in good faith?

Ralph Nader: Polarization is a controlling process. It is instinctual in ruling groups in any culture. You try to divide and rule. When you get down to where people live, work, and raise their families, if a strong appeal is made that's empirically based--like people getting killed in auto crashes before seat belts--the ideological labels that people put on themselves tend to shrink away.

TN: Do you buy into the notion that Republicans obstruct more than Democrats?

RN: I don't have the answer to the breed of Republicanism that is on Capitol Hill. I don't know where these guys come from, other than totally gerrymandered districts.

TN: Democrats are very insulated as well, and you aren't seeing the same tendency toward extremism there.

RN: Not yet. The Republicans are proactive and the Democrats are reactive. And that reverberates [with] the voters. And that's why there are far more "least-worst" voters on the progressive-liberal side.

TN: What do you mean by "least-worst"?

RN: "Least-worst" means even if they hate the corporate Democrats, they will vote for them because the Republicans are worse. [But] the Democrats are more corporate than I've ever seen on Capitol Hill, by and large.

TN: I would guess that a great deal of the Tea Party agenda scares corporate America to death, and pushes it into the arms of Democrats. For example, it doesn't want to see the Export-Import Bank shut down.

RN: Yeah, that started before the Tea Party. I mean Clinton, the Clintons were perfect examples of corporate Democrats. He wrote the blueprint.

TN: Let's talk about "too big to fail." There's a very interesting ideological convergence there, because conservatives don't want to have to bail out the banks again. Do you see any hope of limiting the size of banks?

RN: Yeah. I think both sides see that once the economy is on...

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