TO THE RAMPARTS

Reviewed 6/09/2019

To the Ramparts, by Ralph Nader

TO THE RAMPARTS: How Bush and Obama Paved the Way for the Trump Presidency, and Why it Isn't Too Late to Reverse Course Ralph Nader New York: Seven Stories Press, August 2018				Rating: 4.5 High
ISBN-13 978-1-5011-7551-0
ISBN 1-60980-847-9	304pp.	HC	$26.95

I ask you to ponder the fate of our Republic. Ask why we have almost unconditionally given up our enormous sovereign power as "We the People" and delegated it to those out-of-control, raging members of Congress. One percent or less of our citizenry, active and organized back home, representing public opinion, could have turned that legislature around.

– Page 112

Ralph Nader has a long-time, and well-earned, reputation as a man who fights to assure that people without much power get a fair shake. He is often called a consumer advocate; but really his advocacy goes deeper than that, to the fundamentals of politics that set the rules companies making those consumer products must follow.

In this book, published long after Trump came to occupy the Oval Office, Nader examines the reasons for the real estate Mongol's1 success. He concludes that the Democratic Party bears a big share of the blame. While not in most senses equivalent to Republicans of recent vintage, Democrats in leadership roles have abandoned their party's traditional support for working people and cottoned up to wealthy donors. The result is growing inequality of wealth and income as GOP policies favored their well-heeled donors, and Democrats provided little resistance. Consequently there was a growth of grievance at the base of the pyramid — a resentment asking to be exploited.2

The book is a retrospective, looking back over the GW Bush and Obama administrations and reproducing a number of letters that Nader wrote to the latter, none of which got a reply.3 This gives it an unfortunate, "I-told-you-so" tone.

But that is a minor defect. There is much information here, including eight possible planks for a Democratic Party platform (pages 14-17) and an analysis of areas where President Obama did not perform well (cabinet appointments, campaigning, drone strikes, trade policies). It also cites a number of useful books: a few by Nader, most by others. Unfortunately, these books are not listed at the back of the book. It has neither bibliography, notes, nor index.

Nader has not lost the ability to imagine a fairer system of government, or the will to fight for it. His last chapter, 27, is called "Resist on the Barricades," and it closes with these words:

"We are a country that has far more problems than it deserves and far more solutions than it applies. This is largely due to the control of the many by the few, which creates a democracy gap filled by a plutocracy.

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"We must tell our lawmakers we are not going away, and that we will keep coming back with more and more of our fellow citizens, even more informed and determined to achieve the good life with justice, peace, health, and opportunities. This kind of momentum really gets the attention and concern of members of Congress.

"It's in our hands."

– Page 304

I mark this book down one notch for its tone and its lack of notes or index. Despite that, I consider it well-written and inspiring, and rate it a must-read.

1 Forgive the play on words. Trump, like other wealthy developers, is often called a real-estate mogul: a reference to the Moguls of India, descendants of Mongol, Persian, or Turkish conquerers. I use the earlier form because it connotes a barbarian warlord type, e.g. Genghis Khan.

2 A similar warning was delivered well before the 2016 election in Thomas Frank's Listen, Liberal, and another in 2010 by Robert Kuttner in A Presidency in Peril.

3 Nader wrote such letters to both former presidents. He published a collection in Return to Sender: Unanswered Letters to the President, 2001-2015.

Errata for To the Ramparts