Mr. Nader Goes To Washington
A conversation with Yale historian Paul Sabin about activist Ralph Nader, inventing public interest activism, and how liberals learned to distrust the United States government
Left to right: President Gerald R. Ford, Sylvia Porter, and activist Ralph Nader at a meeting of the Citizens Action Committee to End Inflation in 1974. Photo credit: White House Photographic Office/Wikimedia Commons
In recent weeks, as students have mounted the most significant protests against United States government policies for over fifty years, many observers worried that progressive young people have become alienated from Democratic politics. They find liberal solutions insufficient, and demand accountability from their universities, from government, and even their employers. But this isn’t the first time this has happened: when we compare today’s activism with the radical movements of the 1960s, we forget that there was a third way, one that was symbolized by Ralph Nader, who reinvented what it mean to be a citizen crusader. Historian Paul Sabin, Randolph W. Townsend, Jr. Professor of History at Yale University, tells that story in Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism (W.W. Norton, 2021).
Claire Potter: Paul, today we face campus protests against United States complicity in the war in Gaza. But even prior to this crisis moment, there has been skepticism among young people about the capacity of the government to do good things and apathy towards what the Biden administration does do. The critique of liberalism as corrupt or insufficient to urgent needs isn’t new, so Ralph Nader’s crusade to hold government accountable from the left seems even more relevant now than when Public Citizens came out three years ago.
Can you tell us what the book is about?
Paul Sabin: Sure. The book starts in the post-World War II period, and it's really about the consolidation of what historians call “the New Deal Order.” That means the growth of the administrative state, and the growth of agency power, that enacted Roosevelt’s liberal vision. We are talking about remaking the American landscape through investments in transportation, housing, big dams, and other types of large-scale infrastructure projects.
But there’s also a backlash against big government, starting in the late 1950s and early 1960s, not just on the right but on the left. Public intellectuals and activists like naturalist Rachel Carson, urbanist Jane Jacobs, and Ralph Nader held government’s feet to the fire. They argued that some of these changes were destructive and irresponsible because they made the environment Americans lived in unsafe. These environmentalists created organizations called Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs) that began to sue the government to end, or reform, these agency-led infrastructure and development projects.
Normally, we associate anti-government activism with the rise of the New Right. But Public Citizens tries to understand the role of liberals in shaking the foundations of the New Deal order. It reveals a split between two different kinds of liberals: big government liberals, and the public interest liberals.
And the idea behind PIRGs is that they assemble teams of ambitious young activists, lawyers mostly, who research a problem and figure out how government can redress it.
Exactly.
And Ralph Nader becomes a central, and charismatic figure in this movement, which many people have forgotten, given his third-party spoiler role in the 2000 election. But in the 1960s, what was the nature of his beef with the government?
Well, Nader was both a proponent of government (he worked briefly for the Department of Labor) and a critic of government. What he was really interested in was holding agencies accountable, and creating systems that could rein in and oversee federal interventions in the public realm, and that made government transparent.
He started this work in the mid-1960s with a focus on automobiles and automobile safety, and in 1965, he wrote a book called Unsafe At Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile. He argued cars were essentially dangerous, and that they didn’t have to be, but for the close relationship between the auto industry and the federal government. Too much responsibility was being placed on the driver, and not enough on automobile makers and the highway developers.
We don't usually think of automobile safety as an environmental issue, but Nader did. In his mind, the campaign was about creating an environment of safety for the individual. Drivers had a right to a safe car, one where the door wouldn't pop open, and people wouldn’t hit their heads on the dashboard in an accident.
So, Nader was interested in trying to create a safe environment for the individual. And he connected that to ideas about governance, which he was fascinated by from a very early age. He studies town meetings, and other venues for public participation, even traveling to Northern Europe in the 1960s to study the idea of the ombudsman. This was an entity within government that would oversee government agencies and expose their flaws and limitations.
So, the idea of the PIRGs was that average citizens could play that role: investigating public agencies, ferreting out information, revealing what they were doing and the regulations they were issuing. Ah yeah, exercise and some kind of oversight over what they were doing and this this started.
Our younger listeners may not be able to grasp how different it was to ride around in a car as a child in the 1960s. Nobody wore seatbelts. Kids sat in the front seat. Station wagons had a seat in fold-down the back so kids could sit there and look out the back of the car and be crushed if the vehicle was rear-ended.
My memory was that it wasn't just a seat. It also became a flat thing that you bounced around in.
Those were the days, right? And Nader’s point is that the government has all this power to make cars safer and isn’t using it because government agencies are in cahoots with big business to not regulate them. So, he jumps in and says: we need real regulations, we need to research them, and since government isn’t doing it, I will.
How does he get started with that?
Well, he starts as an individual, doing it himself, and becomes a sort of one-man investigating the automobile industry. But he then going on to investigate other things: the connection between coal mining and black lung, natural gas pipelines. His idea was that he would become an expert in something, expose what was going on through research, and develop close relationships with reporters. He would then drop off material on their doorsteps at night and see if see it would appear in the papers.
Nader has his first success though in 1966 when Congress holds hearings on the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act. He's published this book, so he’s an expert. He testifies in the hearings, and then gets involved consulting with Senate staffers who are writing the bill. It also sets up a tension within liberalism about what government’s relationship to corporations should be.
On the other side, you have Lloyd Cutler, a major democratic lobbyist, who is kind of connected to the civil rights movement. He’s an old guard Democrat and represents the corporate liberal wing of the Democratic party. Nader and Cutler are in adjoining rooms, and senate staffers are going back and forth to figure out what will be acceptable to both sides.
This represents a new kind of negotiation within liberalism. Citizen activists are new players on the left attacking the old liberalism of people like Cutler.
Yes, and for those who don't have a background in the history of this period, there are liberals and conservatives in both parties. The civil rights and anti-war movements are raging around them, Democrat Lyndon Baines Johnson is the war president. Nader sort of inserts himself in this political atmosphere as a moral center that social issues can be attached to. It becomes attractive to a whole younger generation of activists.
And some of those activists go to work for him and are nicknamed “Nader's Raiders” by the Washington press corps. How did these young people get to him?
Nader recruited them. He went up to Harvard in1968, gave a few talks about his vision, and all these Harvard students, and others, applied to come work for him. That first summer, they investigated the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and uncovered the cronyism and failure to regulate corporations.
Nader was a real inspiration to young people, and he believed in them. He also worked them extremely hard. The PIRGS were notorious for terrible hours, and everyone complained about them. But Nader’s people worked all the time, which is what he famously did. Nader was a very ascetic and a workaholic.
But he also empowered young people, and that first cohort wrote a big report on the FTC just as the Nixon administration was coming in, and it did inspire some reforms. But establishing Nader's moralistic approach to politics was more significant: he didn’t side with one party over another. He saw himself as outside, and in some ways above, the parties; he took a moralistic tone to politics, and he and his followers had an idea about accountability.
Would you say that Nader had contempt for the political party system?
I think that's right, and you can see early on in his career some of the impetus for what he would do in 2000: running as a green party spoiler candidate. In the 1950s and 1960s, he talked about third-party candidacies, and he wasn't alone in that. There was a general sense on the left that the two major political parties were deeply flawed, that they were corrupt, and that they needed to be reformed. After 1968 convention, and the tumultuous Democratic convention, there was momentum to try to reform the parties, open them up to primaries, and create more openness in the party system.
But Nader did not see himself as a party man by any by any means.
And the people who worked for and with him were also choosing another kind of politics. On the one hand, in the 1960s there are all these young people in the streets, but there’s a whole other group of idealistic young people who go to law school to make change.
I think it's important to situate the rise of PIRGs in the context of the Civil Rights and anti-war movements, because I think those were real inspirations for the public interest movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. They were inspiring, and although they were often frustrating, it was also clear that the federal government could accomplish things and it had flaws. The government lied to Americans about the war and had limits in addressing civil rights issues.
So, the radical 1960s led to a generation of people who wanted to make change. Nader’s people may not have been as radical as some, but many of these lawyers were also in the streets. You know, they would go to work for Nader during the day and then they would go protest the Vietnam war outside of the office.
What the public interest movement offered them was a way to use their legal skills to try to remake the system, to work within the system to do that, and they put themselves out there as a counterpoint to rioting and more disruptive protests.
And they were encouraged in that by the Ford Foundation, a major funder of many of the nonprofit organizations, which imagined them as a sort of third, extra-governmental force. They would work within the American system, and not destroy it. Nader’s was a more independently funded group, but the yeah effort but the broader movement--things like the Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Of course. the guy who's running the Ford Foundation at that point is McGeorge Bundy, who is funding all kinds of projects that are seeking to expand the public sphere, such as public television. A grants officer at Ford starts funding women's studies programs. Why did foundations care so much about expanding the public sphere?
That's a great question. I think that what the public interest movement represented in those years was a sense of possibility within liberalism. During the 1930s, you had a critique of the private sector and a faith in government within liberalism that results in the creation of the New Deal and all its agencies. There’s the idea of a balance of power within society between labor and business and government.
But by the 1960s, there’s not only anxiety about corporate power, but also the emergence of anxiety about government power. The Vietnam war, nuclear testing, pesticides, and insufficient support for civil rights were all associated with the government. And so public interest is seen as something that can be distinct from both business and government, as well as the labor unions. PIRGs are representing this amorphous thing called “citizens.”
But it’s also a response to the alienation of Americans from big institutions: a growing federal government and an expanding corporate sphere. Foundations see small nonprofit organizations and citizen organizations to engage Americans and reconnect them to the society. So, that's why you see an extraordinary explosion of growth in nonprofit organizations during the 1970s.
But the distrust that PIRGs act on then changes the terrain of politics by generating distrust too, right? A lot of government distrust is warranted, but today it's gotten out of hand. How did we get from that place where critics were pointing out conflicts of interest and corruption and incompetence to this place where everything government does is considered suspicious in some quarters?
That is a complicated issue, but I think the starting point is the administrative state that emerged in the 1940s and 1950s. It had deep flaws, and I think that sometimes liberals who defend the government today don't really wrestle enough with those complexities, and that's part of what I was trying to do in Public Citizens: understand how the critique of government emerged on the left in response to things that government agencies were doing.
For example, you have people organizing the first earth day in 1970 who say that environmental crisis is being caused by the government and its agencies. You know, federal projects like the construction of the interstate highway system and building the big dams; or destroying treasured rivers and wilderness areas. There’s the testing of atomic weapons that is spreading radiation. There are pesticides supported by the Department of Agriculture.
So, you have all these different things in which the government is playing a key role. and they created tremendous skepticism about government power and a desire to rein that in.
It’s important to understand that there are multiple tracks of attacks on government, and many originate with people who still fundamentally believe in public institutions, want to improve them, and want to make them more accountable. One of the challenges, however, is that there is another whole critique of government that is more destructive and more hostile to the fundamental enterprise of government itself.
That’s what is embodied by the Reagan revolution: people seeking to roll back government's role in society. They are explicitly attacking the idea of government as a legitimate enterprise. They think private entities, whether companies or private individuals, are a better locus of power. So, what we’ve seen is a disintegration of the idea of what government can do you know over the last 40 years.
Under Biden, that’s reversing with the Inflation Reduction Act. and the infrastructure bill, and that began under the Clinton and Obama administrations. Democrats are struggling to rebuild a version of government that can act and is also accountable. I think it’s a struggle for liberals to accomplish both things.
How about the Carter administration? Jimmy Carter was a farmer, cared about the environment, and totally got it what dams did to the environment and halted all federal dam projects.
Carter was a big river protector. He was interested in that as a governor, and he saw that as a big part of his legacy in Georgia. He had spent his childhood roaming around in the fields in the woods and was a passionate environmentalist. He also was a believer in government efficiency and fighting government waste.
So, Carter came in, saw the big the big federal water projects as both environmentally destructive and just a waste a waste of money, and he was trying to attack both things at the same time. It's an interesting story because he had a very idealistic goal and he got really nailed for it, by Democrats--who still controlled Congress—among others. So, he had to backtrack, and then he got hammered by the environmentalists, who saw him as having sold out their vision.
And this is the dilemma of the of the of a liberal administration: trying to succeed politically by passing policies, trying to represent all the constituencies in the Democratic party, and groups like Nader’s. Nader and others really start attacking Carter by the 1980 election, because they see him as having betrayed them. Carter sees it the other way: he's trying to balance a whole set of competing interests and be effective politically. But by the end of the administration, some of the environmentalists are saying: What's the difference between Reagan and Carter? And then John Anderson runs in 1980, and so does Barry Commoner, the big environmentalist, on the Citizens Party line.
And of course, in 2000, Nader runs.
And that’s we're seeing today: Joe Biden's infrastructure bill isn’t just an economic or infrastructure project. It's a political project. It's pouring money into communities that need jobs and putting Biden's name on it. Carter, on the other hand, doesn't seem to get it that when he says no more dams, no more highways, he’s cutting his own party off at the knees.
So, what turned ordinary Americans off liberal solutions?
Certainly, Nader and others elevated a disdain for traditional politics, and a sense that the party and government apparatus was corrupt--the state parties in particular.
And I think that this in in many ways sort of turned many liberal Democrats off from politics itself. For a generation, I think there was a sense that there was a purer way to approach political action--through nonprofits, or citizen organizing. At the same time, you also see in a lot of the legislation the culmination of struggle around environmental justice and community empowerment that begins with Nader and other PIRGs. Environmental justice organizing is still working to rectify past injustices and funding inequities.
So, this kind of activism didn’t replace politics; it changed politics, and probably for the better. But Ralph Nader remains a divisive figure in this movement: a loner, an absolutist, and who ends up being blamed for turning the government over to George Bush in 2000. But you got to interview him: how does he think about his impact on American society?
I did have a chance to talk with Nader. The first time I spoke to him, I had been trying to get in touch with him for maybe six months or so, to no avail. Finally, it was 10:30 or so on a Saturday night, and I was watching TV, and had had a drink and next thing I know the phone rings so and it’s Ralph Nader.
And he starts to interrogate me about my academic interests, and things that I'd worked on, and then he started to ask me about the corporate takeover of the university--had I read this book?
And he says, “It’s terrible and we must do something about it. You should do something about it!” And he tries to enlist me: he says, “We should create a new organization. Now, we'll get a thousand academics at least, to put in you know, $50 each, and we'll have a new organization, and we'll combat the corporate takeover of the university.”
That’s hilarious.
It was just quintessential Nader. I guess at that point he must have been in his late 70s. but we had only been talking for 15 minutes and he was y ready to start a new nonprofit organization and mobilize.
How does he see his own legacy?
Nader was such a charismatic public intellectual, like many others of his generation, and a tremendous motivator of young people, but he has never been particularly reflective about the possibility that he might have been wrong about various things. For example, he is very insistent that he wasn’t responsible for the outcome of the 2000 election. It was Vice President Al Gore's fault for not campaigning, better. He doesn't take a nuanced approach to the complexity of what his role might have been not just in the at election, or to how the creation of nonprofit public interest might have undermined liberalism more generally.
But there's currently an attack going on what Nader and the environmental movement of the 1970s achieved, and particularly on environmental review, which was designed to slow down and review big projects. Now we have a climate crisis, and we need to build solar and wind projects, housing, and transit. And as part of that, there's been a very interesting critique that earlier environmental regulations build in delay and make it impossible to accomplish the goals that liberalism demands today.
I just think that's a fascinating dilemma, and I don't think the environmental leaders of the 1970s, including Nader, have reflected on this complexity. Nor have they come to terms with a different world that's not about stopping things but trying to proactively envision a future and use the government to build it.
What I’m reading:
Robert Harris’s Act of Oblivion (Harper, 2022), a historical novel about the manhunt for the Puritans who put Charles I to death. In 1660, the monarchy is restored, and there is drawing and quartering to be done, but two of the regicides have escaped to Massachusetts. Something I have already learned: three streets in New Haven—Whalley, Dixwell, and Goffe—were named for regicides! I lived there for years and never knew this.
Blast from the past—literally:
Folks are wondering why South Dakota Governor and potential Trump Veep Kristi Noem would tell people that she shot her dog—a revelation that probably horrifies those suburban women both Trump and Biden want in November. Readers of this newsletter know that she’s a Gun Chick. If you have a question about Kristi Noem that you would like answered in this newsletter:
Short takes:
In an outstanding display of political cynicism and opportunism, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton has introduced a bill that “would prevent anyone convicted of a federal or state-level offense committed at a protest at a university or college from having their student loans forgiven,” Chance Phillips writes at The Alabama Political Reporter. Named “The No Bailouts for Campus Criminals Act,” the bill seems unlikely to affect any student protester, since the vast majority have not been charged with felonies. Alabama Senators Katie “Scary Mom” Britt and Tommy “Coach” Tuberville jumped in as co-sponsors. (May 7, 2024)
“What do the protesters actually stand for?: writes Jill Filipovic in an article at The Atlantic where she expertly addresses questions of antisemitism, trolling, and political targeting roiling colleges, universities, and secondary schools in the United States. Protesters often communicate in euphemisms that journalists don’t bother to translate for outsiders. Such euphemisms, Filipovic argues, portray all protesters as peace activists, when actually, some are—and others aren’t. A portion of the activists “are against Israel’s war in Gaza,” Filipovic writes, “but do not seem to be opposed to bloodshed if it’s in the service of extinguishing the world’s only Jewish state.” (May 6, 2024)
Members of the House Intelligence Committee are saying aloud “saying aloud what they once whispered behind closed doors,” writes Alex Finlay at The New Republic. The Putin government, which is known to have paid politicians in Europe, may be doing the same thing in the United States in an effort to choke off material support for Ukraine. “While we cannot say for sure if any Republican officials are on the Russian payroll in ways similar to their European counterparts, we can be sure that they’ve been approached,” Finlay writes. Since 2021, national intelligence sources say that politicians and media figures have been approached, And one House member who is suspected by her colleagues of having taken the bait is known informally as “Moscow Marjorie.” (May 4, 2024)