Greenery, enamored of cooperation and wary of dissatisfaction and disillusion, also forgets that individual freedom needs collective solidarity. As we reject the first movement, so we must spurn the second. The final problem with Nader and the Greens is the least specific, but probably the most important. Ralph Nader claims that the system has fundamentally broken down, and that it needs reconstruction by attacking corporations and promoting communities. It increases public cynicism about government and its effectiveness, cynicism that the right can capture far more effectively than the left.
Liberal policies begin with the view that many problems demand public solutions.
This analysis demands that we believe the system can work. The past generation has endured Vietnam, Watergate, the hostage crisis, Iran-Contra, and l'affaire Lewinsky. It has also seen the historic rise of the Right, and the first serious rollbacks of what welfare state the U.S. constructed. These events are linked. Nader claims that the system can't work, and offers as a solution mainly vague talk about bringing people together.