Ralph Nader on Dave Brat: ‘A Clear Populist Challenge by Main Street Against Wall Street’

The American left’s reaction to Dave Brat’s victory over
Eric Cantor last week sometimes seems to be taking place on two
different planets. There are the people who simply recoil in horror
that someone even more conservative than Cantor! could be
heading to Washington, and there are the people who look at the
libertarian and populist elements of Brat’s message and see some
conservatives taking a step in the right direction. Ralph Nader

belongs to the second group:

among all the reasons for
Cantor’s fall, there were the ones encapsulated in the Nation’s
John Nichols’ description of Brat as an “anti-corporate
conservative.” Repeatedly, Brat said he was for “free enterprise”
but against “crony capitalist programs that benefit the rich and
powerful.” David Brat pointed out that Cantor and the Republican
establishment have “been paying way too much attention to Wall
Street and not enough to Main Street.”

Brat supported “the end of bulk phone and email data collection by
the NSA” and other government agencies on constitutional
grounds.

Professor Brat attacked the Wall Street investment bankers who
nearly “broke the financial system,” adding the applause line:
“these guys should have gone to jail. Instead of going to jail,
where did they go? They went to Eric Cantor’s Rolodex.”…

Brat is a mixed bag for progressives. But in that mix is a clear
populist challenge by Main Street against Wall Street and by
ordinary people against the corporate government with subsidies and
bailouts that the Left calls corporate welfare and the Right calls
crony capitalism. Therein lies the potential for a winning majority
alliance between Left and Right as my new book, Unstoppable: The
Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State,
relates in realistic detail.

Read the rest
here. Check out Reason‘s coverage of Brat’s
win here.
For more on populism, go here,
and for more on the intersection between populism and
libertarianism, go
here and
here. To read Tim Carney’s review of Nader’s new book, pick up
the July Reason at your local newsstand. And for
Reason‘s recent interview with Nader, hit play: