Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism - Paul Sabin (link)
Public Citizens accomplishes two things. The first is ostensibly the book's explicit purpose—that is, judging Ralph Nader's* political project as more or less a failure through the lens of a worldview based on the self-evident goodness of existing liberal governance. I will expand on this in great detail later.
*I'm aware Nader was not the only person in the consumer advocacy movement, but the narrative of the book focuses on him, so I will also use Nader as a short-hand for the movement in this post
But first let's talk about the second, far more useful accomplishment. By painting a detailed picture of Nader's advocacy and the political climate in which it took place, Sabin has (likely unwittingly) laid the groundwork for a meaningful and robust critique of Nader from an anti-capitalist perspective. This evidence points to two specific axes along which Nader's work was doomed either to inadequacy or outright failure.
The first of Nader's fundamental problems is ironically the same issue I have with the author (more on that later): an underlying bias towards fundamental liberal/capitalist assumptions about the limits of political imagination. My personal judgment is that reformist attitudes such as Nader's are not inherently doomed to irrelevance, but having the misfortune to attempt this specific project during a period of rapid alignment of capital (the dreaded "neoliberal turn") certainly muted his accomplishments. Regardless, his disavowal of socialism/communism probably boxed him in to an overwhelming degree. The book describes his attitude towards extant socialist political economies as cold at best, and paints his perceptions of the USSR as being overwhelmed with bureaucracy and not as subject to "insecurity" as was needed for his reformist goals. A grant proposal he wrote in 1968 to "propose a fundamental change to the American political and economic model" is probably the most concise demonstration of his ethos in this regard. He identifies the problem with American society as one of domination by "countervailing powers, with three major forces—big government, big labor, and big industry—each pursuing its own interest and balancing off the interests of others." This suggests perhaps a vague spark of anti-capitalism, but if that ever did exist in Nader it's snuffed out by his proposed solution to this problem, namely "the ad hoc force of the public or the citizen-consumer." By using the term "citizen-consumer," he's defining the people he's advocating for explicitly using the terms of the "major forces" that contribute to their ongoing oppression.
The second problem from an anti-capitalist perspective was that Nader was entirely too enmeshed within existing structures of capital. His movement was one of "professional citizens [that] necessarily attracted individualistic middle-class and educated followers." Sabin quotes the Environmental Defense Fund's co-founder as explicitly saying "we operate entirely within the sociological structure." The book goes into great detail about how the Ford Foundation and Carnegie Corporations were major backers of the consumer advocacy movement. Not only did this arrangement limit Nader's organizations from being overly political; it also served to de-radicalize and control young idealists: "Rebellious law students, who initially aspired to an egalitarian organizational structure with no single chief executive, quickly found themselves working under a former assistant US attorney with an inaugural board that included prominent New York lawyers and civic leaders." As one of the founders is quoted in reflection, "we opted to work within the system of political economy that we found and we neglected to seek transformation of the system itself."
All this said, it's hard to fault Nader too much, as was able to use the tools at his disposal to accomplish a great deal. And as I've studied the seventies more and more, I've come to see capital's entrenchment during the period as largely inevitable, given what came before. As such, Nader's direct responsibility for helping to establish regulatory bodies and standards that persist to this day (albeit in some disrepair) is commendable. The book itself does not deny these accomplishments, which leads to an unresolved tension within its narrative. How can one frame Nader's efforts as an "attack on big government" when those very efforts were aimed at reforming the government largely by using its existing processes and institutions? Sabin never identifies this contradiction in his narrative, and as a result his argument falls flat.
There's a few different angles to this disconnect. The most obvious one is that Sabin's narrative often provides direct support for Nader's claims that various structures of liberal governance were fundamentally corrupt or incompetent. Sabin concludes his section on unions by blaming Nader's rhetoric for their decline: "The critique of labor organizations [...] drove a wedge between unions and liberals [...] that would help undermine unions in the years ahead." This comes less than two pages after an anecdote about a Nader-backed reform candidate being murdered, along with his wife and child, by henchmen of the entrenched union president he was challenging. Later, Sabin details how Nader and his allies took Edmund Muskie (among others) to task for their perceived weakness in standing up to the forces of industry. Sabin categorizes such political pressure as "an ambivalent relationship with the Democratic Party" while simultaneously admitting that the strategy worked, resulting in the passage of legislation that was "tougher than it otherwise might have been." The book never really tries to resolve this tension, largely ignoring the validity of Nader's claims and rarely providing any alternatives to Nader's approach, which he seems to find distasteful.
Sabin also appears to draw a number of connections that aren't supported by his evidence. He credits Nader's reforms with "creating a politics that was less transactional and more ideological," but provides no direct evidence for such a claim. He claims that Nader's success "created more arenas for conflict—the courts, Congress, regulatory settings, and the media" while ignoring that those are inherently political arenas explicitly designed to manage conflict. He categorizes progressive opposition to Carter as a "lack of unity" and as "caring more about political purity than...the liberal political coalition" while ignoring the larger context of Carter's (and thus the party's) rightward lurch. He blames Nader for airline deregulation while a) providing minimal evidence for the claim (he sources like 10 books for that paragraph and I couldn't find independent confirmation, so take it with a grain of salt that Nader even supported it), and b) minimizing the roles of those in power (and not really mentioning who influenced them, by the way) that actually passed the bill. He makes a half-hearted attempt to a connect Reagan's anti-government rhetoric to Nader's critique of government, but a) it's not very convincing, and b) only serves the purpose of casting Nader with a thin haze of suspicion. Sabin spends several pages describing Bill Clinton's weird Reaganism-lite politics, but it's never clear how this is supposed to stem from the consumer advocacy movement other than an overlap in word choice. And as you might have guessed, he saves his weirdest analysis for the 2000 election:
"Nader expressed politically damaging vitriol for Gore and the Democrats by equating them with Republicans. 'Our two parties are basically one corporate party wearing two heads and different makeup.' [...] Nader threatened to dampen voter enthusiasm for the Democratic candidate[...]and to tip the balance in one of the swing states."
Both here and elsewhere, Sabin provides zero concrete evidence for the "politically damaging" claim, makes zero effort to engage with the actual substance/truth of Nader's argument, and fails to mention Bush v Gore even once. What's more is that, for all his liberal assumptions elsewhere in the text, he seems to miss a key one here—namely, that in a liberal democracy the point of the vote is to cede absolute power to the people, if only for one fleeting moment. The people who voted for Nader owed Al Gore precisely nothing; not their enthusiasm and not their vote. And in as much as Nader represented the concerns of his constituents, neither did he. Sabin's prose is dispassionate enough that I can't say for sure that this book is entirely motivated by a grudge against Nader, but there is absolutely a preponderance of effort to that effect.
What further reinforces my reading of this book as some sort of weird Freudian retribution scheme is how Sabin betrays his own lack of imagination around the capabilities of government just like he depicts Nader as doing. He speaks of "Nader's inability to come to terms with the compromises inherent in running the executive branch." He says "the public interest critique of government held those in power up against a model of what they might be, rather than what the push and pull of political compromise and struggle allowed." He credits Carter with "a pragmatic approach to governing that might integrate these conflicting truths (of the value of government vs its limitations)." Finally, he seems to sum up his ethos best in the closing paragraph (emphasis mine):
"By primarily playing the role of uncompromising outside critic, the public interest movement neglected to build support for government in a way that could facilitate policy-making in a politically divided nation or that could support internal reforms that might improve government operations. Americans continue to struggle to craft an approach to governance that acknowledges, and strives to balance, the inherent limitations of government, markets, and citizen action."
I very much understand the immediate, practical limitations to what can be done under our current regime. I know that Medicare For All will not be passed tomorrow, no matter how many people want it to. But that's not the scope of the political project described in this book, and the author is being dishonest in treating it as such. For whatever faults Nader's project may have had, it was a dedicated attempt to ameliorate legitimate problems through relatively moderate, structural means over a long period of time. If you are really advocating for the continued existence of a system of government that has an "inherent limitation" against achieving modest reforms such as these, then what do you really support? Why does it seem that these "limitations" Sabin invokes line up almost perfectly with the type of government he seems to desire? Sabin never addresses let alone conceives of these questions, so I will leave it to the reader to ponder them further.
In the end, you have a liberal author enamored with the New Deal order writing a diatribe of sorts against a liberal activist who worked towards something slightly different. That the author fails to grasp any larger truths (ie. how the collapse of the Bretton Woods system likely made any sort of continued New Deal formulation inherently untenable) ironically mirrors how Nader may have underestimated the efficacy of his approach in the wake of the neoliberal turn. In this way, Nader's actions and Sabin's narrative represent two different sets of liberal ideals that have both wielded meaningful political power in the recent past. And yet, here we are.
