Nathan J. Robinson  

Your new book is, in many ways, a positive book. It is a book about what people can do. It is an empowering book for citizens of our democracy. But before we get to the positive part, I want to dwell a little bit on the negative. Obviously, we have a new president. Trump has returned to power this year, and is in many ways tearing apart a lot of the institutions that you so value. Could you tell us a little bit about the situation that we are in right now under the current president?

Ralph Nader

Well, this book, Civic Self-Respect, fits like a glove with the fascist dictatorship that Trump is imposing on the country. He’s an elected dictator—that’s happening around the world. But a lot of Trump voters are saying, I didn't vote for laying off workers, and diminishing Medicaid and the Veterans Administration Services, and taking away food inspection workers from the meat and poultry line. So it comes down to this: do enough people have civic self-respect to change their daily routine and to basically pick up the effort to stop the slide into an even more disastrous three-and-a-half years under the Trumpsters?

It’s obviously a responsibility for Congress, the courts, the press. But underneath all that is the level of activity of the ordinary citizen back home, which would filter back and give backbone to the media, backbone to Congress, and illuminate the judges who have got to be more than rubber stamps for Trump fascism.

And there is no other word for it. Notice this, Nathan—just notice this. DOGE, which is an illegal, so-called advisory committee, focusing on efficiency and getting rid of waste, completely turned their back on the biggest sources of inefficiency, waste, and corruption, which is corporate crime ripping off Medicare, Medicaid, and other benefit programs; corporate welfare, hundreds of billions of dollars shoveled out by Uncle Sam under corporate lobbyists; subsidies, handouts, giveaways, bailouts, and all kinds of tax loopholes; and then a bloated military budget, which went the other way [from cuts to increases]. Trump wants to add another 100 billion more than the generals asked for—and that’s, of course, a budget full of waste, fraud, and corruption by the military contractors.

So that’s what happens when people don’t have enough self-respect. That’s why this book is so personal, not to me—it’s personal to the roles people play. I’ll tell you what inspired this book. I’d be speaking around the country, and after the session ended in the auditorium, people would often come up and would say, well, Ralph, I’m a nobody, but I really have to ask you this question. And I said, you’re a nobody? Hey, time out here—you’re nobody? What do you mean? You’re nobody? Let’s go through the checklist. Are you a citizen? Yes. Are you a worker? Yes. Do you shop and consume? Yes? Are you a taxpayer? Yes. Do you vote? Yes. Do you have kids? That means you’re a parent, right? Sometimes they say they’re a veteran, and that’s the point I'm trying to make, that all these ordinary people have roles that they have some experience and expertise in, and they’ve got to give it in a daily, not very challenging, manner—a civic improvement dimension.

And if they do, then you get that feedback. That’s why we’re paying a little attention to ultra-processed foods, and it’s causing chronic illness and undermining the health of kids, in particular—junk food, junk drink. It’s because a few people are pushing back from around the country, and they’re getting the ear of some of the legislators and some of the people in the regulatory agencies.

Robinson 

I want to get to this question of what ordinary people can actually do, which is so important, because it’s the number one question we get here too. People say, well, you’ve shown me all the things that are wrong, but what can I do? And your book is, in many ways, an answer to that. But I want to just continue to dwell for a moment on the problems that we face. You’ve used the terms “fascist” and “dictator” to describe Trump. But Trump does so many things in quick succession that it can be hard to know what to focus on, what the most serious problems are. Steve Bannon says this is a deliberate strategy, which he calls “flooding the zone.” So how would you encourage people to think about what the most serious crises and crimes are, the things that demand the most of our attention and our focused action?

Nader 

Well, we’re not going to have to tell them, because it’s coming now. They’re seeing rising prices. Already there’s more unemployment. Because of Trump, we’re seeing the situation where people are being expelled from the country after their work in key service areas, like harvesting our crops, cleaning up after us, taking care of our elderly and kids—home health care workers—and all the things that they’re doing. They’re feeling it, and they’re going to feel more of it.

So the real answer to your question is, whether they’re listening to the radio or TV or social media, everything that the U.S. government is doing to help people is being slashed. People are being laid off—civil servants—right across the board. It’s really quite extraordinary. It’s like Trump has a checklist on how to hate the American people.

Just recently, they’re cutting out critical things like the chemical safety review board, which is supposed to keep an eye on big chemical plants near cities so they don’t explode. And that’s a $19 million budget, and you cut it out. That isn’t what the Pentagon spends in an hour. So they’re feeling it. So the answer to your question is the crowbar—the main tool left that he can’t control is the Congress. Now you say, well, the GOP controls the Congress. That’s true, but the GOP is starting to have doubts already. Marjorie Taylor Greene said that if she knew that in the bill that she voted for in the House, the tax budget bill, that Trump wanted to preempt the states from regulating artificial intelligence, she would have voted against the bill. Well, two questions. Number one: What do you do, Marjorie Taylor Greene? You vote for bills, and you don’t know what’s in them? What do you have staff for? And number two, when that comes back to the House, unless there are dramatic changes, it’s going to be hard for Speaker Johnson, who is really a terrible, evil guy—just listen to what he’s saying, and a total tail of Trump—to get it through.

Well, where’s the feedback coming? Where do you think? Town meetings are jammed. People are pushing the Democrats, saying, what are you doing back there? Get more comprehensive! We want you to go on the offensive here! And so that’s the kind of feedback that they’re getting, in addition to social media pressure. And people have got to realize that Congress is the most powerful branch of government, even though it’s behaving over the years as an ink blot, giving all this constitutional authority to the White House. And don’t think that Trump didn’t notice the war power, the spending power, the tax power. He shouldn’t have any authority to impose tariffs. That’s a congressional authority.

So to answer your question, you focus on Congress. That is the tool and that’s going to lead to impeachment. You say, oh, impossible. Really? I remember they said that about Nixon. He won in a landslide in 1972—not a squeaker—over McGovern. A landslide: 49 states. And did that help him in the Watergate scandal? No. Republicans saw their political support tanking [in] the ’74 election.  The Senate delegation [to] the White House said, your time’s up, you’re done.

Robinson

That shows you there how quickly things can change as public opinion changes. But you mentioned there the Democratic opposition, which is a crucial piece of this story. Obviously, over the course of your career, you have been known as a staunch critic of both parties, of not just the horrendous corporate fascism of Trump, but also of the fecklessness of the Democratic Party.

I assume you would probably agree with the statement that Trump’s victory, this fraudulent populism of his, would not have been possible if it were not for certain features of the Democratic Party. So tell us about that side of the story as we linger here on the failures before we get to the empowered citizen.

Nader

Completely. The Democratic Party was a flat tire in the election. We can document that better than anybody in the country, because Mark Green and I—and others—assembled 24 civic leaders in July 2022 on a Zoom call with any Democratic candidate running for Congress, and five or six showed up out of 200 and some. And what did we do? We showed them how to win! We showed them how to win. These civic leaders don’t just talk to conservative or liberal workers. They talk to all workers, all patients, all taxpayers. And so they each had about 12 minutes on the Zoom call, and they laid it right on the line: the strategies, the tactics, the language, the slogans, the rebuttals, the ways to get out the vote that the Democrats contract out to consultants who are servicing their corporate clients at the same time. Most people don’t know the Democratic Party contracts out its campaigns to these corporate conflicted consultants who control the money, the scheduling, what shouldn’t be talked about.

And so here are the Democrats that could have landslided Trump on the following simple issues:Authentically pressing for $15 federal minimum wage—that’s 25 million workers getting a raise; authentically pressing for an increase in Social Security benefits which have been frozen—get this, frozen for over 45 years—that’s 70 million elderly; and then the child tax credit, which they pushed and wanted extended, and the GOP opposed it in 2022—they need to make an issue out of it, that’s 60 million kids, including conservative families, who got about $300 a month, almost cutting child poverty in half before the Republicans blocked it.

And never mind cracking down on corporate rip-offs: stealing the savings and consumer dollars all over the country—red state, blue state—that polls at over 85 percent. Never mind increasing taxes on the grossly undertaxed super rich and multinational corporations, that comes in at 85 percent. That’s all left-right voters, and they blew it.

Why? Because they’re in the pockets of the corporations. When you ask the Democrats, how are you doing? The first answer is, we're raising a lot of money—well, we have to raise more money than the Republicans.

They didn’t even have slogans, Nathan. Earlier, they came up with this: build back better—boy, that’s exciting—in 2020. And then in 2024, how about this one for Kamala Harris? See if this excites you: She was going to create an “opportunity economy,” and then she sends her brother-in-law up to Wall Street to get advice on tax policy.

So they elected Donald J. Trump, failed gambling czar, disastrous first-term president, and all the rest of the lying, crooked, self-enriching, ignorant, vicious, and hateful characteristics of this corporation in the White House masquerading as a human being.

Robinson

There is some level of introspection going on in the Democratic Party after the election. At least, there are discussions about the question, why did we lose? And one of the popular answers that is emerging among elite Democrats to this is found in the current number one best-selling non-fiction book by Ezra Klein of the New York Times and Derek Thompson of the Atlantic. It’s called Abundance. And I don’t know if you know anything about this, but you personally come in for criticism in this. In fact, they sort blame, in many ways, you and the “Nader’s Raiders” [activists] of the ’70s for creating a bloated administrative state. I just want to read a couple of things from the Ezra Klein book, because as we’re discussing how the Democrats need to reform, I was hoping you could respond to this. Essentially, their argument is that, in many ways, liberal governance has failed. It’s failed to build, there’s a lot of red tape, and so it’s made it so that conservative criticisms of red tape and bureaucracy have some teeth to them. And they say in their book:

Nader didn’t just criticize the government. He launched a movement to tame it. His Raiders contributed to some of the most important environmental laws in history[...] but what they were building was an arm of liberalism[...] designed to relentlessly sue the government itself, and that would go on to fight for more bills and rules that would widen opportunities to sue the government. Nader [himself said], “I don’t know anyone who sued more [agencies and departments].”

And they said:

Nader and his Raiders believed in government. They defended it from conservative assault. When they criticized it—when they fought it, sued it, restrained it—they did so to try to make it better. But those same laws and processes were available for anyone else to use, too. You can bog clean energy projects down in environmental reviews. You can use a process meant to stop the government from building a highway through your town to keep a nonprofit developer from building affordable housing down the block.

I don’t know if you’ve heard about this criticism and how you would respond to it. There’s a big Abundance conference now that’s had congressmen at it. A lot of them are kind of latching onto this narrative that, in some ways, efforts to tame the government ended up making the government ineffective.

Nader

Shame on Ezra Klein... The Democrats always scapegoat their losses. It’s never their fault. They never look in the mirror. They’re always looking at, the Green Party did it, and Dr. Stein did it...

The problem with Ezra Klein is, he never talks to people like us. He doesn’t put people like us on the program. He doesn’t know how to use phrases like corporate crime or corporate welfare.

So let’s address what he’s saying. We got a lot of good laws through in the early ’70s and late ’60s. There were laws to save lives on the highway, in the marketplace, in the food arena, in the hospitals. There were laws to reduce air and water pollution, to make household products safer. So basically, it was the government saying to corporations, you’re not going to decide who’s going to live or die anymore by your profit calculation. You will have to meet mandatory safety standards.

So what’s so wrong about that? You would think he would at least focus on all the lives saved and remarkable reduction in lead poisoning of people’s body with the end of lead-based paint and gasoline, and cleaner water and so forth. Instead, he hops on this [narrative of] obstruction by bureaucracy, and [says] you can’t get anything done in terms of projects because of all the permit complexities.

Well, see, he doesn't go deep enough. For example, the greatest obstructions often come from corporations, demanding waivers, demanding all kinds of things for their own preference. The tax code is massive and full of loopholes and inefficiencies and preferences and privileges. That’s the result of all the corporate lobbying. So he doesn’t mention the role of the tax code. He mentions that if you want to get a building permit in New York, it’s like a nightmare, and there’s a lot to that, but to blame consumer advocates and environmental advocates? Why don’t you blame the local government and the various business interests who get locked in and demand this kind of response, or this kind of product, or this kind of material, or this kind of review?

To make Ezra Klein’s narrow argument legitimate, he’s ascribing too much power to the people, instead of the corrupt politicians who are always responding to one special interest after another that has a stake in a particular project or a particular undertaking that we used to call public works. The problem with Ezra Klein is he doesn’t focus sufficiently on the corporate domination of our political economy, of our culture, of our children, and he’s lost his way.

Robinson 

I want to turn to this vision of an empowered, active citizenry that you have laid out in this new book. As I say, you don’t dwell on all the crises and problems so much in this book. You talk about what it means to be part of a democracy. And you take people who feel, I think, probably more disaffected, more separate from the political process than ever, who really feel deeply cynical about the media, Congress, the presidency, and institutions generally—they’re losing trust in universities and scientists—and you try and give them something. You say, here’s what it could be, and here’s what your role could be. So lay out for us a little bit more specifically what that is that you’re telling these people who come up to you.

Nader

Well, what I’m telling them is, stop making excuses for yourself and rendering yourself powerless. [Because] then you either turn on yourself—you pick up an addiction—or you get nasty or cynical and put people like Trump who lie to you in office. So the first step in civic self-respect is just to get people to say, I count, I matter, I have significance.

And how do you get them to say that?

Look at history. Why do you think Richard Nixon, arch-conservative corporatist, when he was president, signed into law the Environmental Protection Agency, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration? He signed into law the Product Safety Commission. He put in an environmental advisor in the White House that Congress wanted him to do. He signed the air and water pollution laws, except the water pollution law he vetoed.

But why did he do all that? Because he heard the rumble from the people coming out of the ’60s. He was the last Republican to fear liberals. He heard the rumble, and every citizen can contribute to that rumble. When these politicians come around during their campaign and shake hands, [people] can contribute by not being flattered by them and smiling. They can demand something. They can hold their hand in a handshake until they get a commitment. They can summon them to their own town meetings. We even have a summons where people can turn it around instead of the Senator or Representative choreographing it.

So that’s what you’re seeing around the country right now. You’re seeing the rumble starting to increase, and you’re seeing young challengers of democratic, corporate incumbents in primaries. You’re seeing that. You’re going to see at least 15 to 20 challengers of old-line Democrat incumbents like Richard Neal in Massachusetts, who is a corporate Democrat and felt pretty good about the Trump tax cuts when he became chair in 2019 of the House Ways and Means Committee. He said he wasn’t going to revisit them. He’s being challenged. They’re being challenged in Michigan. They’re being challenged in Florida. So you’re getting an electoral rumble.

An electoral rumble expands when more people have civic self-respect. Civic self-respect is not just for ordinary people in their various roles. You’ve got people now who are Veterans for Peace. You have several thousand veterans who said, we know a lot about war, we know a lot about how it’s boomeranging, we know a lot about all the killings abroad by the U.S. empire, and we’re going to do something about it. And they are. They’ve got 100 chapters. They do nonviolent civil disobedience. And as we talk, they’re in their third week of hunger fast in communion with the starving people in Gaza under the heel of the fascist terrorist Netanyahu.

So they’re doing their part, but it’s just a tiny number. Well, what if it was four times as much, 10 times as much? That’s what we’ve got to talk about. They’re using their experience to create a civic dimension to what they've gone through, and they have moral authority, and they’re doing it. So, this book has all kinds of examples of people who start out in the day as a consumer or worker or voter or taxpayer or parent, and they say, there’s something I don’t like here. I want more physical education in the schools. I want more civic education in the schools. I’m going to go down to the parent-teacher meeting. I’m going to find out who agrees with me.

Well, it turns out, Nathan, that there is a lot of left-right agreement in this country. This business of polarization—red state, blue state—is a 2,000-year-old manipulation of divide and rule by the ruling classes. I wrote a book called Unstoppable, where I easily listed 25 major areas where there is left-right support in this country—conservative and liberal—like cracking down on corporate crime. At one point, there was 90 percent of the people who wanted to break up the big New York banks after the collapse and the unemployment and the recession in 2008-2009. And if you go down the abstraction ladder and get away from the politicians’ ideological manipulations and slogans, people want safe food. They want clean water. They want good public services. They want fair taxes. They want schools that work. Whether they’re conservatives or liberals, they want a living wage and an adequate retirement package. They want to be respected in a workplace that’s safe and provides them with dignity, unlike Starbucks and these others, like Amazon warehouses. So that’s a huge opportunity for mobilization and a small “d” democratic takeover of our government by the people.

Remember, the people are the only people mentioned in the Constitution. The Constitution doesn’t mention corporations or companies or political parties. It’s “We the People,” not “We the corporations.” It’s not “We the Congress.” So that means that people, when they get civic self-respect, they realize, gee, we’re the sovereign—we have the sovereign power. No one else has a sovereign power. So that develops more civic self-respect, and it becomes cumulative. You think the former presidents of the United States, George W. Bush, Clinton, Obama, and Biden have civic self-respect? They’re not taking on Trump. Trump’s destroying the AIDS program, the only thing George W. Bush could be proud of, and he shuts his mouth. And they’re going after Obamacare, and Obama’s hardly speaking out. And Clinton, and so on. So the civil self-respect is all the way to the top down and bottom up. And that’s why this book was written. And you cannot escape this book if you read it because it’s all about you, the people.

Robinson

You’re right that people do want a lot of the same things. There is kind of a consensus around these basic human rights, these sensible public policies, but they can feel so out of reach. And as I say, you are really trying to overcome a deep sense of pessimism and hopelessness. Certainly activists on climate change, or pro-Palestine activists who couldn’t even get Kamala Harris to meet with the families of Gaza victims, can feel really like it’s so hard to actually shift public policy. But over your career, you did successfully shift public policy, and I wonder what lessons we could draw from looking back over your experience, and actually managing to achieve real, substantive victories. You talked about the pressure to get Nixon to resign. You talked about the pressure to get Nixon to sign environmental legislation. What are some other examples where organized citizens have actually succeeded in getting meaningful concessions and gains?

Nader

Mothers Against Drunk Driving. How about that? How about the gay rights movement? That was considered totally impossible. How about the women’s rights movement? How about the Civil Rights Movement? How about the environmental movement? When I started with the environmental effort, they said, you’re going to get lead out of gasoline? Do you know how powerful the oil industry is in this country? They own Congress. But it’s all a matter of numbers.

Let me give you a metaphor. You’re driving on a highway with other cars. Suddenly, all the cars stop because there’s a boulder in the road. So some drivers get out, three of them, and they try to push the boulder to the side, and it doesn’t move. So they call on three more and it doesn’t move. And they call on four more drivers up in the line, and it starts moving.

So it’s a numbers game as well. Our history is full of a tiny number of people, so what is the number that’s needed? Remember this, one percent—this isn’t the other one percent, the Wall Street one percent—of voters in congressional districts, that’s two-and-a-half million people, organizing Congress watchdog groups where they do the following: they set up an agenda of long-overdue changes, some of which we just mentioned; number two, they know what they’e talking about, and they’re accurate; number three, they represent public opinion—I just mentioned some of the 85 percent support, etc.; and number four, do they just march and demonstrate with the energy going into the ether, or do they focus on the decision makers, in this case, the 535 people in Congress? Warren Buffett once said, there’s only 535 people, we’re millions of people—how come we can’t control them?

So throughout history, of all the major changes we like for justice, not one of them required one percent of the people. Volunteering is like a hobby. A hobby—what is it? Five or ten hours a week, those who volunteer. Congress watchdog groups set up an office with two full-time people in each district to do the daily work. They summon the members. They’re not working with emails not returned, to phone calls not returned. They summon them to town meetings. Five-hundred clear signatures on a petition with the description of what the person is, the occupation, and email signature will get you a member of Congress to your town meeting with very few exceptions, and a thousand on a petition will get you a Senator. That means you’ve got the power that you have delegated to the Senate representatives sitting right there in front of you—no flags, no intermediaries, no one in between—and you, the citizenry, run the town meeting. We want universal health care—every other country has it. Two thousand people a week are dying because they can’t get diagnosed and treated in time because they can’t afford it. We want it. The public wants it. We’re sending you back to Washington. That kind of specific, informed demand, and then we want to know what you’re saying, and the press is right there. We want to know your response here. These members of Congress cave fast when they realize that the money they raised from these commercial interests are nowhere near as important as the votes they desperately want back home. They want money to intimidate primary challengers and get a safe seat, but if you show them you don’t have a safe seat any more, those days are over. It takes just one percent of the people with those conditions—representing public opinion, knowing what they’re talking about, focusing on direct meetings by the decision makers.

Robinson

Ralph, what you’re saying here makes me think that in many ways, “you can't fight city hall” might be one of the most dangerous myths that we have in our culture, and that, in fact, the strongest weapon that the ruling class might have is people’s belief in their own powerlessness in fighting the ruling class.

Nader

Precisely, you hit the nail on the head. I wrote a column a while back on how the educational system educates children to become powerless. They don’t have civic education. They don’t connect with community issues, they don’t connect knowledge to action. They don’t show what these kids’ rights are. My sister wrote a book recently called You Are Your Own Best Teacher! tapping into the imagination and curiosity of pre-teens to liberate themselves from the internet gulag.

The Silicon Valley monsters are electronic child molesters. They’ve got five to seven hours a day from many of these children, separating them from their parents, community, and nature. Corporations are raising our kids. Well, it doesn’t take much to beat back on that, because you’ve got red state parents and blue state parents who have lost control of their kids, and they know it, and they’re mad, and they know who’s doing it. But it does need organization and civic self-respect because, as you said, when they say to people “you can't fight city hall,” that’s the way to try to get them to render themselves powerless, to make them not want to develop civic skills in adult education. What are civic skills? That’s something that we should ask ourselves as citizens. For example, there are two questions that every reporter and every citizen should ask an elected politician on a particular position the politician takes. Question one, what is the legal authority for your declaration or your proposal? Question two, what is the evidence to back up your claim? They never ask Trump that. Trump lies to them. When he does things that are manifestly false, cruel, and vicious with his executive orders, the press almost never asks, what’s the evidence? He got years of acclaim by the MAGA guys that the 2020 election was stolen. But the press never said, give me your evidence. Oh, three million illegal immigrants voted. Where’s the evidence of that? Come on, give me your evidence, and we want documentation. Otherwise, shut up.

Robinson

There’s almost an excessive cynicism, the idea that because he lies so much, it’s futile to challenge this stuff. And one of the things I just truly have always appreciated about your work is you don’t have any illusions about corporate power, about fascism, but you never lapse into pessimism and cynicism. You still believe in these values of, let’s stay informed, let’s take action, let’s hold these people accountable, let’s not tolerate lies and call them for what they are. And you somehow, in a world that, to many people, can seem so bleak that it’s not worth trying to do anything, without downplaying the problems—in fact, in many ways, stating them more in a more extreme fashion than many people would say, using words like fascism, dictatorship, and oligarchy—manage to still maintain the determination that it is possible to radically alter the situation that we’re in.

Nader 

Because in the early ’70s, late ’60s, I discovered how easy it was. We reached a point in Congress where we could pass almost any consumer bill. The only question is whether it could override a veto. Now you can hardly get a hearing. The cumulative effect of people rendering themselves powerless, giving up on themselves, not taking advantage of their knowledgeable roles as voters, taxpayers, workers, parents, consumers, and veterans means that it is harder now than it was in the late ’60s and early ’70s.

However, we still have a Congress, we still have a constitution, we still have elections. And my optimism is that we’ve done it in the past. We have examples here of people who did the impossible because they didn’t think it was impossible, and they got important changes. And it’s still happening in some parts of the country. You and I and others have read about when people rise up. So it’s a matter of not getting discouraged when you step forward, and you’re the only one—then there’s two, and then there’s 20. You feel confident you’re not alone, and then you reach critical mass. Now in this book, for example, the stories of two children are discussed. Greta Thunberg, everybody knows her. She’s on a flotilla to break the siege, non-violently and peacefully, with humanitarian aid in Gaza and is a very brave person. And look what she’s done to mobilize young people all over the world on the deadly effects of global warming. And then there’s Felix Finkbeiner. You ever heard of Felix Finkbeiner?

Robinson

No. 

Nader

Okay, so that’s what I mean. See, one of the problems is the media doesn’t publicize civic victories or civic initiatives, and therefore they weaken what could be. Because we couldn’t have gotten the auto safety bill through in Washington without the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Detroit Free Press, Detroit News, AP, and UPI reporting what we were doing up there. So the media plays a very important role here in aggregating civic self-respect.

Felix Finkbeiner was a nine-year-old in 2007; he heard about a Kenyan woman dedicated to restoring her country’s forests, for which she received the Nobel Prize. So he decided he was going to be the reason for planting one billion trees in Germany and around the world. And his stamina at such a tender age brought him worldwide media notice. And by the time he was 18, he met his goal. A billion more trees were planted in the world. This book is full of examples like that, where people have a higher estimate of their own significance. Nathan, that’s what it comes down to. Civil self-respect. That’s what Obama, Biden, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush do not have as former presidents. They could have a major impact. After all, they received the votes of tens of millions of people, and people know their names, and they’re not standing up to Trump. They have no civic self-respect.

Robinson

A couple of points there. One of the things that struck me about Obama was that his movement was all about him and electing him. Hillary Clinton’s slogan was “I’m with her,” not “she’s with you”—not about empowering the people in that movement. And you mentioned Greta Thunberg. She obviously was just a teenager who decided to do something, and she accomplished such a great deal as just a normal 15-year-old who had that sense of determination. One of my favorites is the campaign in the U.S. to abolish pay toilets. In Europe, you have to pay to use public toilets all over the place. We don’t have that in the United States because there was a movement. There’s all these wonderful examples of there being a movement.

Nader

That’s right. By the way, what I’m recommending in terms of civil self-respect is, emotionally, it’s not a very happy life to go through it day after day being ripped off, disrespected, with calls not returned and benefits not provided by insurance companies. So when you have civil self-respect, you have a more interesting, meaningful, and happier life because you’re not sitting there taking all the crap that people have to take every day. You’re in the fray, you’re in the arena. And I remember we did a book once on women activists, and the writer went all over interviewing these women—women in England against the nuclear arms race, women trying to stop a nuclear plant in Michigan, and so on. And when she came back, we interviewed her. And I said, you’ve been all over interviewing these amazing women who never were active before and became civic advocates and leaders—what’s your major impression that you got from them? And she said, my major impression? I've never met happier people.

Robinson

Just to close here, personally, you are now 91 years old. As you look back on your life, you gave up a lot. You’ve worked very hard. You made choices. You graduated from Harvard Law School. You could have gone to corporate law like all your classmates, and you chose a life that was probably exhausting and frustrating in many ways, but I assume you come to a similar conclusion and feel satisfied at the end of the day.

Nader  

Well, when you see how many lives have been saved because of simple safety devices in motor vehicles, every day you’re reminded. Every day I hear trucks backing up with the bell. Don’t you hear that every day?

Robinson

Yes, yes.

Nader

Well, they used to call that the “Nader bell.” We found that trucks backing up without a bell have killed people and kids. They don’t see the kids, and they drive over them. And now, all over the country, the trucks are backing up with bells, and you don’t see many fatalities from what was a very avoidable risk pattern. That’s just one example. What worked early in the ’60s and ’70s was then counterattacked by the corporations, and the Congress got more corporate legislators, and we know what happened in the White House, and the media started backing off. There’s no Phil Donahue show anymore—that reached 10 million people—to give voice to all the major dissenting movements that prevailed, from civil rights to women’s rights to consumer rights to environmental rights. There’s no such program anymore. That’s gone.

We were not invited to congressional hearings anymore. Congress is on a Tuesday to Thursday week when they’re in session. They work for about 135 days a year. So they don’t have Monday and Friday to do hearings. They don’t have the kind of citizen hearings anymore. All this, by the way, is why we started this new publication called Capitol Hill Citizen. And so that continues to be gratifying, but what is appalling is the collapse of so many of these wonderful efforts beneath the bulldozers of corporate supremacists and their political toadies in Washington, in state legislatures and city councils. So you always have to anticipate that after your success there’s going to be a counterattack, and you’ve got to anticipate it. And what happened is that millions of Americans took these changes for granted, and didn’t realize that they or their predecessors were responsible for the rumble from the people that transformed the Congress and [made it] begin to pay attention to the necessities of the population. So we’re in the most critical political crisis in history, and it is a crisis which can be called the corporate fascist state, as more and more Silicon Valley artificial intelligence connects with the Pentagon, connects with the crazies in the Trump administration. And so the forces of fascism are tightening, suffocating the initiatives of a genuine democracy. So that simply presents the stark choice, doesn't it? Either we surrender and hoist the white flag, or we organize and fight back. And guess what? We the people are the only sovereign, and we the people outnumber all the fascists.

The last message is, it starts with you the people and goes directly into Congress, your most powerful tool to turn these situations around.

Ralph Nader speaking to the Senate Baking Committee, 1971.

Transcript edited by Patrick Farnsworth.