An Unreasonable Man, as its advertisements have made perfectly clear, is about Ralph Nader’s legacy. Specifically, it is a film made by two persons who love Ralph Nader, Henriette Martel and Steve Skrovan (Martel appears as a talking head within the film), and who wish to reclaim his identity as a great progressive crusader, and not the spoiler who cost Al Gore the election and sent George W. Bush to the White House for 8 years. It is pure and unspoilt hagiography.
It is all the worse a hagiography, I think, for its feints in the direction of even-handedness. In order to persuade the audience that it is not a whitewash, the directors include interviews with prominent anti-Naderites Todd Gitlin and Eric Alterman, and they are given perhaps disproportionate face time compared to all of the other interviewees save for maybe Nader himself (Joe Tom Easley, a former member of “Nader’s Raiders” is also on hand for some tut-tutting about the election, but he clearly regards the man himself with a great deal of awe). Yet the format of the film permits no doubt as to its polemical aims. An Unreasonable Man argues first and foremost that Ralph Nader has done many wonderful things in his life and therefore the 2000 election doesn’t matter.
Thus the first half of the two-hour movie is given over to a treatment of Ralph Nader, 1965-1980. And it is, without a doubt, a compelling and perhaps important portrait of a passionate man who quite undeniable changed America for the better. I am not here to proclaim that Nader achieved nothing of value, or that he is not a great patriot. For quite some time in 2000 – the first election I could ever vote in, mind you – I was a Nader supporter precisely for the reason that I respected his history. I shall not repeat the many successes of Nader’s career, nor catalogue the setbacks that plagued him in the late ’70s and throughout the Reagan Revolution. Those are easily found facts, and I would not deprive the film of its argument.
What the first part of An Unreasonable Man succeeds at doing is describing the necessity of rabble rousing activism and people who want to change the world. The title comes from a Bernard Shaw quote that forms the film’s epigram, defending the unreasonable men of the world as the only one who are dissatisfied enough to change things. I agree with this sentiment. And Ralph Nader of the decades before my birth was a great mover of American society in whose debt we remain. That is beyond debate.
However, the film is clearly not “about” Nader’s successes, it’s about his one great failure, which occupies almost half of the film’s running time despite representing five years out of the 40 year span of Nader’s political career. Not that Martel and Skrovan consider it a failure. To them, as to Nader, as to his many supporters, running in the 2000 election was a means to drag the Democratic Party back to the left, to “hold their feet to the fire” as many people quip during the film. There’s not a meaningful difference between the two parties after all, so why not vote your conscience? We all heard this back in 2000 of course, so I’ll stop rehashing it.
Except as I hope it doesn’t taking stating, there’s a great fucking big difference between the Democrats and the Republicans, and it came to the fore on 9/12/2001. Okay, some things are true: the Democrats have largely folded on some very important things such as funding the Iraq War and oversight, and they are still folding. They are spineless and bad at politicking. Everyone knows that.
But can any rational being argue that if Al Gore were president in 2001, there would have been a war in Iraq, now or ever? Would Al Gore have passed the PATRIOT ACT, would he have authorized illegal wiretaps, would he have made torture an official element of American foreign policy? Of course not. To be completely frank, I tend to doubt there would have been any successful terrorist acts against this country on 9/11/01 under President Gore.
To my knowledge, Ralph Nader has never once admitted to the following propositions: that if he had not run for president, Al Gore would have cleanly won the election (of course, he did win, both the popular and the electoral votes, until the Supreme Court decided that recounting Florida was unseemly and unfair) with at least Florida and New Hampshire going into his column; that Gore would not have done any of the many terrible things that have been done in the last five years in this country. For Nader to admit to neither of these facts represents the height of naïvete, or perhaps simply willfulness, and I’m content to forgive him all if he only said once in his lifetime that he was a factor that cost Gore the election, and it was very bad that Gore lost.
(A brief aside: several Naderites contend that Gore ran a poor campaign, and that is why he lost his state of Tennessee and Clinton’s state of Arkansas, and why so many Democrats voted for Bush. A likelier explanation is that the country has been trending conservative for decades, and for Gore to take those votes would have required that he run Right. Would Nader and company have forgiven that? No, and rightfully. But it remains the case that much of the non-Nader reasons for Gore’s loss can be regarded at least partially because he was too liberal for the gutless centrists of America in the modern age).
Yes, Gore lost for many reasons. One of them was Ralph Nader’s presence, and that is the only factor that Ralph Nader could control. Moreover, it was pretty easy to see that at the time (and that is why I stopped supporting the Greens in late September, 2000). It doesn’t take away from all of the wonderful things that Nader has done and all the good progressive things that he believes to say that. Was he a deliberate spoiler? No, I don’t think so. But it is obvious that he felt he ought to give the Democrats a good scare, and his reasons for thinking that are tricky at best.
The words “megalomania” and “egotism” get thrown around a lot in An Unreasonable Man by both sides, and they are both wrong words. Within the film itself, there’s little denying that Nader is a very humble and self-abnegating man, and vanity does not strike me as being a good explanation for his actions. A better explanation is that Nader has a messiah complex: he believes that he must save the world, even if it means wrecking his own life and reputation to do it. The interviews all circle around that idea, especially Nader’s own: he says flat-out that he doesn’t care about his legacy, if his work survives, and several friends and semi-friends testify that he has nothing like a personal life. There’s something noble to that single-minded sacrifice of oneself to the greater good, but it’s also obnoxious and even dangerous if it shades (as it seems to here) into the belief that a man is a sort of mortal saint. The people who like Nader practically worship him, and being surrounded by that constant validation of his essential goodness seems to have given him a sense of divine purpose.
The language he directs at the Democratic party is entirely in keeping with that sense. He alone, St. Ralph, can show them the True Way back to the Left. I’d call it subtly messianic if it wasn’t so overt, and frankly I think it’s more bothersome than mere egomania – there’s no way to counter it.
Nader’s single-minded belief that he alone must save the Democrats or kill them is also just plain wrong. It is important to recall that this film was shot in 2005 and premiered at Sundance in 2006, long before the midterm elections demonstrated that progressives were only mostly dead, but even in 2004 it should have been much more obvious to Nader that there is a liberal coalition dedicated to dragging the party back to the Left: the netroots. I’m kind of a fringe member of same, so grain of salt et cetera, but internet activism has been increasing with every passing election, and while I’m not enough of an optimist to claim that by 2008 the internet will be the chief force in American electoral politics, it’s obvious that weblogs have an ever-increasing amount of leverage. Not enough, but six years ago they had none at all. Look at the pressure being put on Edwards over Iran (he gave in). That would have been unimaginable in 2004. The internet is the future of politics, maybe not this cycle but within a decade. Nader never mentions the internet or blogs. One wonders if he is aware they exist (yes, I know he does, please don’t tell me he does, I’m just saying it’s not in the film).
That’s the future, and Nader will have none of it. The primary tone of An Unreasonable Man is elegiac, recalling past victories and defending past fuck-ups. But that’s not where politics lie. Politics are about what happens next year, next election, next generation. That’s something that Barry Goldwater knew, and it’s why we had Reagan, Bush I and the carousel of unhinged neo-cons holding the reigns right now. It’s something that progressives and liberals and leftists have always been bad with until the very recent past, and it’s surely why the Kerry debacle fell upon us: “electability” is a word that should be stricken from the Democratic vocabulary, it’s not a word of strategy but a word of taking the temperature five minutes ago. For all his vision, Nader is still fighting the fights of the 1960s. His is a worldview ill-suited to the modern world. Let us not forget him, but for the love of all things holy, let us please not strive to be him.