By Jacqueline Luqman
Ralph Nader is now vowing to help Joe Biden win because he’s terrified of Trump, and we’ve been here before. Nader said in a Washington Post article, “I know the difference between fascism and autocracy, and I’ll take autocracy any time. Fascism is what the GOP is the architecture of, and autocracy is what the Democrats are practitioners of. But autocracy leaves an opening. They don’t suppress votes. They don’t suppress free speech.”
For Nader, “Biden is better than he has ever been but he is still terrible on empire and Wall Street.” I don’t know Nader’s measure for claiming that Jim Crow Crime Bill Corn Pop He Thinks Black Parents Can’t Read Joe Biden is better than he’s ever been. The Black “parents can’t read or write themselves” canard was his response to a question about education reform during a 2019 meeting with Black mayors in Georgia. So Biden is better? For eulogizing Strom Thurmond? Dragging Anita Hill over the coals? Promising to cancel all student loan debt and reneging by claiming he never said that? Saying he’d be the most pro-union president ever and then shoving a contract rail workers didn’t want down their throats to avoid a strike? If that weren’t enough, Biden did not fight to extend and make permanent child tax credits, ended SNAP benefit and Medicare enrollment and coverage extensions, and free school lunch programs. These were COVID-19 policies and programs that gave poor people a little bit of breathing room. Now, they have all either expired or been ended in compromises with the Republicans, putting poor people back to pre-pandemic levels of suffering. Let’s not forget how Biden lied the country into a proxy war using Ukraine against Russia. How in the world is Joe Biden better than he’s ever been, Ralph Nader?
Nader also says that the Democratic Party isn’t fascist but autocratic, and he’d take that any day over fascism. What kind of liberal lack of logic is this?
It’s obvious that people in this country, even allegedly very smart people, don’t know the nature of fascism in this country and internationally. George Jackson in his books Blood In My Eye and Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson describes the fascism that emerges from the authoritarian nature of capitalism: (1) capital accumulation produces a completely unchecked capitalist class; (2) a corporate state is produced through the literal purchasing of governmental institutions by the capitalist class; (3) increasing economic hardship for a majority of Americans; and (4) a complete reliance on state violence at home (through militarized policing) and abroad (through imperialism and war) to control the angst of working-class people and develop new markets outside of the United States to replace work that provides a living wage.
The dominance of monopoly capitalism combined with state repression produces the core tenets of fascism: anti-socialism that rejects economic programs based on socialist frameworks. Instead of universal programs that provide health care, housing, education, and good food for all people, we get individualist pursuit of wealth and profit, capitalist and market-focused competition. Such a society excludes and keeps down non-privileged immigrants, and Black, LGBTQ+, disabled, and incarcerated people, as well as communists/socialists/anarchists. Violence is key to this system, from policing, to prisons, to militarism and war.Jackson argues that America is a fascist nation, with the ultimate expression of state repression found in the nation’s criminal justice system.
To Nader, autocracy, where a ruler has absolute power and takes no account of other people's opinions, is better than fascism because there’s some alleged opening for…whatever. Autocracy, however, is a characteristic of ruling class-based fascism, which is built on class solidarity around extraction of profit, inequality, exploitation and oppression.
Nader is an elite man who is not a member of the most subordinated and excluded classes of people in this country. He is not a poor or broke person struggling to put food on his family’s table, keep a roof over their heads, put clothes on his kids’ backs, or manage an illness with no medical insurance. The rest of us, in comparison, live or die because of the apathy of those evil psychopaths who call themselves legislators and politicians.
The working class and the poor in this country don’t get a choice between fascism and autocracy because it gives us both no matter who is in office. There is no “opening” in the current system for our interests, humanity and wellbeing. What is this man even talking about?
As to Nader’s bizarre claim that the Democrats don’t suppress votes and they don’t suppress free speech, they do both. I agree with his criticisms of the Green Party as unorganized and needing to run a comprehensive grassroots campaign more frequently that extends beyond presidential campaigns. He should know, since he ran as the Green Party’s nominee for president twice, and was blamed for Al Gore’s loss in 2000, despite Gore losing Florida and the Supreme Court decision which gave the election to George W. Bush. And even though Ralph Nader himself said in a letter to the New York Times in 2016 “Don’t Blame Third Parties,” he’s throwing the Green Party under the bus this year to sheepdog third-party voters back into the Democratic Party, the very party that limits voters' choices by restricting debates and denying voters the option of voting for Green Party candidates.
Democrats have sued in court to kick the Green Party off the ballot in Texas, North Carolina, and Wisconsin. Democratic governors like Andrew Cuomo in New York have enacted legislation to make it harder for all third parties to gain ballot access. Did Nader forget about the sabotaging of Bernie Sanders’s campaign by the Democratic Party TWICE? Denying voters the right to cast a ballot for the candidate and political party of their choice is the definition of corruption and voter suppression. Where has Nader been with the Russiagate campaign? Anyone who challenged the lie that Vladimir Putin interfered in the 2016 election and caused Hillary Clinton to lose to Trump was publicly ostracized, condemned, marginalized, and branded as a Putin apologist. Entire publications that challenged the Biden administration’s lies about the Ukraine war were deplatformed. Democrats led the charge on all of that.
Of course, Republicans are fascist warmongering voter suppressing culture warriors. But to claim that the Democrats are better because their methods and language differ is at best immature at best, and willfully dismissive of the damage done by Democrats. And Ralph Nader at 86 is not immature.
Not surprisingly, Mark Green approves. The former Democratic New York City Public Advocate and former Nader protege, hyperbolically says, “Ralph is in a different place because America is in a different place. This stage is stopping a life-ending comet like the one that stopped the dinosaurs. He says this is an existential fight and he is going to marshal whatever he has to stop Trump and Trumpism.”
Such elites never understood that America has always been repressive and fascistic for the working class, poor, and especially those people of color in the US. Voting for Joe Biden to stop what some believe is a worse evil in the form of Donald Trump isn’t going to change that.
Continuing to vote for either undemocratic political party and their candidates - whether you want to call them fascist or autocratic - because they want to maintain the status quo exactly where it is - on top of those of us on the bottom.
Jacqueline Luqman is a radical activist based in Washington, D.C.; as well as co-founder of Luqman Nation, an independent Black media outlet that can be found on YouTube (here and here and on Facebook) and co-host of Radio Sputnik’s “By Any Means Necessary”.
