Unstoppable

by Ralph Nader

  To work at all, convergence must derive from general principles, which interpret realities in ways that produce a broad agreement, with similar or different reasons being given different weights by either side. Such convergences will be welcomed by the public. On the other hand, no alliance driven by Mammon or self-enrichment can earn the allegiance of the public it is being constructed to serve. To be influential on policymakers at the top and with the citizenry behind it at the bedrock of our society, convergence must be the joining of two historic streams of cultural or societal values to change harmful realities on the ground—with no corrosive, conflicting hidden agendas.

  Corporate lobbies have an effective way of putting their agendas first. They know how distracting this can be to the forces of good. Who has the time or inclination for convergence if your forces on the right are arrayed against the forces on the left over such hot-button, time-sensitive matters as major government contracts; subsidies; construction permits; licenses; tax breaks; unions; deregulation drives; earmarks; judgeships; reproductive rights; loan guarantees; revisions of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security; war policies; and the national security state? Both sides have chosen to spend their energies and appeal to their funders on such matters, not to mention that they inevitably are deeply engaged in primaries, elections, and struggles over campaign contributions.

  Companies and their ever-hyping trade associations, backed by large law firms and public relations organizations, are forever enlisting and rewarding their allies in these struggles at the national, state, and local levels of government. Given these intense ongoing battles with no end, and their aggregation into Left-Right antagonisms, convergence efforts take a back seat. Although the contentious issues will differ, the same low priority is accorded to local convergent proposals.

  And what happens to the hapless citizens who are committed to one side or another and look for cues from their accepted leaders? Are they to be relegated to await their leaders, or can they get something started on their own and up the pressure? Obviously, it does happen when there are common material interests of the improving Main Street or the neighborhood variety. For purposes of this volume, I am referring to local convergence all the way up to those national projects, such as the law putting air bags in cars (described in chapter 3).

  10

  Dear Billionaire

  To effectuate the top-down and bottom-up dynamic of effective convergence that moves from thought to action, from being to doing, will take more than polemics. It will take a climbing of the steps, moving ever closer to culmination. This means labor-intensive work, media of different kinds, full-time organizers, and most importantly new institutions just devoted to convergences. All this in turn requires direct resources of a magnitude and consistency that will allow convergers to weather not just the inevitable problems of start-ups but also the storm of the certain opposition.

  Perhaps the best way to present the case for resources is to write a hypothetical letter to a relatively enlightened, nonreclusive mega-billionaire in an era in which such super-rich are increasing their numbers and their social consciousness. Warren Buffett and Bill Gates Jr. are first among the 114 billionaires and mega-billionaires who signed a pledge to give away at least half their wealth to “good causes.” When you look at their website (http://givingpledge.org), you’ll see that just on this list are possibilities that would take us beyond tilting at windmills. So here we go.

  Dear Super-Rich Friend:

  We are sending you this book on the subject of the likelihood and benefits of a Left-Right convergence that would act to bring to existence important but neglected redirections or reforms in our country. You will note that when unlikely forces, historically and continually at odds over other political, economic, and social issues, decide to band together, their combined power can be decisive in unjamming long-prevailing logjams that block needed change and could be instituted locally, nationally, and internationally. There is something purifying and serious about ideological opposites applying their guiding principles to come together and get something done for a change.

  Working together, they give cover to their legislative allies, who need that cover to persuasively explain to their constituents back home why they have allied themselves with and given credibility to their traditional, often demonized adversaries.

  The convergers also bring together different arguments and invoke different traditions to make their cases much stronger. As unlikely partners willing to take political capital away from their usual contentious pursuits, they are likely to secure more media for their combined causes. This was the case with the Left-Right convergence to end the Breeder Reactor boondoggle described in the opening chapter and the repeal of “cartel regulation” of the transportation industry by Democrats and Republicans in the 1970s.

  Indirectly, but importantly, they are broadening the public discourse so as to address reality rather than allow their ideology to deny what is actually going on. As Aldous Huxley said: “Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.” Those words are truer today than when he said them back in the 1930s, given the continuing, intensifying rigidity of positions over grave matters of state, democracy, and economy, often taken to favor partisan party domination or to boost other kinds of self-serving hierarchical supremacies.

  In the previous pages I have tried to make a case that convergences can become realities, and that there is much to converge over, which will break our paralysis as a country. We have, as a society, many solutions—procedural, substantive, and technical—that are not being applied to problems that we have and do not deserve. I refer you to Chapter 4 for a short menu.

  In late 2012, I had two meetings with certified conservatives, one with investigative author and advocate Brink Lindsey of the Cato Institute and one with Stephen Erickson, president of the nonprofit Clean Government Alliance. Mr. Erickson, who exudes energy, sent me a seventeen-page white paper designed to put forth priority convergences and noted the strategic, organizational, and marketing steps to get the missions moving. We discussed three choices to get underway: (1) a clean elections system, requiring a constitutional amendment, given contrary Supreme Court decisions equaling money with freedom of speech; (2) an end to gerrymandering that cynically entrenches one-party district domination; and (3) reasonable congressional term limits to allow fresh energies reflecting public sentiments.

  By contrast, my meeting with Brink Lindsey of the Cato Institute, a large center of disparate conservatives, included Jeff Faux, a progressive economist who started and for years ran the Economic Policy Institute, and Andy Shallal, a successful entrepreneurial restaurateur in Washington, DC, operating five innovative eateries, with public events and bookstores, called Busboys and Poets. Talking to Mr. Lindsey, I learned that he was not that interested in Mr. Erickson’s choices. He cited as his priorities revising the PATRIOT Act to protect civil liberties; confronting the bloated military budget and the empire it funds, starting with a mandatory annual audit of the Pentagon budget that the Congress never gets around to assuring; and ending corporate welfare that conservatives call “crony capitalism.” All of us around the table had no objection to these candidates for convergence.

  Earlier I observed that convergence needs its own organizations, because it will remain third fiddle if it relies on people in the opposing organizations to take time, connections, and reputation away from their programmatic identities to work with longtime adversaries—even though it is exactly through them joining these unlikely combinations that worthy but long-inert proposals can be raised to dynamic visibility. What is required, in my experience of working and observing convergent efforts, are convergence-only organizations in which there are no other overriding priorities and images interfering with the determined mission at hand. Even single-issue groups that substantively should and could converge are reluctant to do so because of the suspicions about such convergence raised by their constituents and contributors, small and large.

  So here
is where my request to you becomes more specific. Substantial financial resources are necessary to make convergence a national movement that means what it says and that is capable of covering increasing numbers of subjects and withstanding the anticipated opposition.

  Step 1 would be to commission writings and videos on past and current convergences. These would show the potential for greatly increasing the number and the gravity of the issues over which groups could converge so as to produce a historic realignment of civic and political forces, thereby allowing them to escape from their present toxic or static conditions.

  Step 2 is to support national and local convocations to deliberate and tentatively agree on selected concrete convergent actions, with suitable proclamations for public discourse.

  Step 3 is to use careful preparation to establish organizations dedicated to achieving specific missions at all levels of our political economy.

  You may be asking, one can hope, about the calendar for any such involvement on your part. That is significantly a function of how many resources are available, together with how they can be employed with prudent absorptive capacity and strategy by the doers. The more there are, the more synergy is produced. Historically overdue change needs to come quickly once initiated, otherwise the forces of the status quo will have time to game the strategies of delay and obfuscation. Universal health insurance was seriously proposed by President Harry Truman to Congress, and we’re still waiting through the sixty-seventh year and counting for this to come to pass. By contrast, auto safety legislation was heard, deliberated, and enacted with overwhelming convergence by Congress within nine months after the publication of Unsafe at Any Speed. It was put into law at a signing ceremony at the White House in September 1966 by President Lyndon Johnson.

  As you know from your own business experience, enlightened companies often do not take positions on matters they believe are good for the country because of the fear of alienating a portion of their employees, shareholders, supply chain partners, or consumers. Convergence can give some cover to these companies as it does for lawmakers. Some corporate statesmanship or corporate patriotism can come alive with such stimuli. There is much consensus in this country that will be seen at the grassroots, once the fog of abstract or manipulated polarization is cleared away.

  My colleagues and I seek a meeting with you to go over what is obviously a number of questions you will have in order to reach a level of rigor, which you rightfully are going to demand. There is an expectation that needs to be conveyed at the outset, however. The requested budget from you, together with any of your colleagues you may enlist, will be in the tens of millions of dollars, subject to strict controls, reporting, and stages of expenditure. The frame of mind we must enter into together, should you be interested enough to continue this exchange and desire to communicate the value of the endeavor to your associates, is in a way comparable to that of industrialists striving to convince investors to commit enough capital for, say, a large steel mill. The factory could not be built without a critical mass of investment money. The same holds true with this promising endeavor of multiple convergences and their expected momentums for a better country and world.

  However, unlike a factory investment in which all could be lost, the convergence initiative has so many locales and redirections available that the real question would be: How much will it succeed? For the civic investment contemplated here is both to build local alliances that then attach to state and national drives for change and to start nationally and work through to the local for a mobilized convergence. Where to start would depend on the nature of the project. In this manner, we will be able to use a variety of dynamics and to recognize that some starts are better at one end of the continuum or the other. For example, the physical fitness project described in Chapter 5 is a natural for local originations and local competitions. The renovation and upgrade of public works in our deferred-maintenance country, especially given where much of the funds must come from, invite a nationwide inspiration with local convergences of business, labor, civic, charitable, and municipal groups as well as individuals.

  Abraham Lincoln once memorably said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Today it can be said, “A house divided against itself cannot thrive.” Just why people oppose each other or do not work together because of contending abstractions or “isms” in our country has been studied too abstractly as well. (An exception is Professor Howard Gardner’s Changing Minds.) It is when means and ends are taken down to concrete levels of scrutiny and examination that fusion comes over the horizon, that the agendas of the influential few—partisan, commercial, turf-holding, fearful, and unknowing—come to the forefront for honest appraisals by themselves and the daunted many. Often convergence is not compromise as much as it is putting together two nearly identical positions that have been separated by other conflicts.

  To imagine is to envision real possibilities that can perpetuate themselves in their own right. We look forward to your reactions.

  Best Wishes,

  Ralph Nader and the Convergers

  Visit www.nader.org for more information.

  Epilogue

  This work has emphasized the convergence of seemingly disparate ideologies on concrete projects and programs for change. John Kenneth Galbraith—the eminent economist for progressive reforms—once wrote that the most vested of all interests are vested interests in ideas.1 He was probably thinking of those historic opponents espousing capitalism, socialism, communism, or the regulatory state versus the unfettered free market economy or the monetarists versus the fiscalists. Actually, the defenders of these positions tend to employ more rigid dogmas than do those with the political labels of conservative, liberal, libertarian, or progressive. People who label themselves with the latter designations are far more likely to converge than the true believers in “isms.”

  Recognized leaders of these liberal and conservative political philosophies, whether they are thinker-scholars, elected representatives, popularizing polemicists, or popular entertainers who speak out, as Ronald Reagan did in his preelective career, have large numbers of like-minded followers in elections, legislatures, or city councils. People follow the cues of these leaders, or they follow the “influentials” in their neighborhood or community who relay these preferences, complete with affirmative phrasings and swipes at the opposition. At infrequent times, as suggested, the dynamic can start with the people and bubble up. AARP’s leaders in Washington, who supported certain disputed legislation, found this out from their members a few years ago to their astonishment.

  But at least in today’s type of top-down political economy and media, when people see the leaders with whom they share strong convictions shift gears, they are far more likely to support the new directions than they would be if they simply heard a debate in which strong arguments are made on either side. This, writes law professor Cass Sunstein, is because people hearing a debate only take in information in a fashion to further bolster their long-held viewpoint. According to Sunstein, people are more likely to accept challenging information if it “comes from a trusted source they cannot dismiss,” because they have regularly agreed with that leader or opinion maker. Sunstein gives as examples if “civil rights leaders oppose affirmative action, or if well-known climate change skeptics say that they were wrong, people are more likely to change their views.”2 President Lyndon Johnson understood this point intimately. When CBS network anchor Walter Cronkite—a highly credible and popular news broadcaster—returned from Vietnam and surprisingly reported to a mass audience that our war there was unwinnable, Johnson told a confidant that the battle for public opinion in America on the war was over.

  Sunstein concludes that who says something can matter a great deal more than simply putting out the information for anyone to absorb. When retired Marine general Anthony Zinni told the Washington Post that it was a serious mistake to invade Iraq, the Post reporter added “that he hasn’t received a single negative response from military peo
ple about the stance he has taken.” Zinni continued, “I was surprised by the number of uniformed guys, all ranks, who said, ‘You’re speaking for us. Keep on keeping on.’”3 What Zinni was saying was being said by many peace advocates, progressive writers, and some Democrats in Congress. But Zinni saying it changed the minds of those who never would have accepted the same arguments from liberals, progressives, or libertarians.

  Zinni, Cronkite, and others who refuse to censor themselves and go against what is expected of them are critically sensible assets in a society in which we are told again and again of our “partisan divides,” our “red” and “blue” states, and how polls show us to be poles apart on so many issues.

  The media, of course, can play a major role in diffusing the news of incipient convergences. However, the media’s DNA is attached to conflict, controversy, and visible disruption. Thus, the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street received coverage because they were loudly making either unusual demands or thunderous declarations. When some Tea Partiers and the Occupy Wall Streeters got together and discovered common ground on such matters as a call for no more bailouts and violations of civil liberties, there was very little coverage, certainly less than if they had a shouting match throwing soft tomatoes at each other on the corner of Wall and Broad Streets. If there is no media, there is no expansion of what has hitherto not been reported to large numbers of people.