The Green platform outlines a great deal of what a progressive might desire, especially on a national health care system. Yet it is also a party that, despite denunciations of corporate supremacism, has little connection with the organized labor movement. The Greens have negligible support from communities of color and Nader's campaign remained a reformist project with bourgeois foundations. Without attracting such key constituencies, Green politics are a blind alley. Ralph Nader ran as a Pure Knight, as a moral crusader who spoke nothing but Social Truth Incarnate.
Reformers come and reformers go.
This time the American public apparently will pay a dear price for Nader's version of reform. Politics are about getting along with opposing opinions in order to create civil discourse in a complex society. Politics that preach uncompromising righteousness and New Moral Orders are diversions into misery. Ralph Nader ran a campaign to clean up the moral corruptions of power in Washington. Theirs was the rhetoric of totalistic social demand and moral cleansing.