Check your civics textbooks and the Constitution; does it say anywhere that the two-party system was ordained by the Creator, or that the Democratic Party has an eternal right to the votes of progressives and leftists, no matter how mealy-mouthed and corrupt the party gets? It's undoubtedly true that many Green voters would prefer Al Gore to George W. Bush, on balance. There's no contradiction involved there; most of Pat Buchanan's voters (outside Palm Beach County, anyway) would presumably prefer Bush to Gore.

But Nader voters -- and Buchanan voters, albeit in smaller numbers -- made a principled decision. Revolutionary, I know, but stick with me on this. They decided it was more important to try to build a genuinely independent political movement than to participate in the profoundly undemocratic choice between two Ivy League daddy's boys suckled on the soft-money teat, about whom the public seems equally ambivalent.

Is building such a movement within the profoundly flawed universe of American electoral politics even possible? Maybe, maybe not. But for many people on the left, the Nader campaign felt like the first genuine injection of positive energy in mainstream politics since Jesse Jackson in the 1980s. We're sick of sitting up late nights like an abandoned wife with a candle in the window, pining for a Democratic Party that ran out on us years ago yet still expects us to show up on Election Day.

Clearly, liberals and activists who still see hope for the Democrats will disagree. But the exaggerated anti-Nader venom, such as that found in an entertaining Salon article by my colleague Charles Taylor, strikes me as an advanced case of kill-the-messenger syndrome. The Democratic Party's injuries are self-inflicted; they can't be blamed on a geeky consumer advocate and his tiny, poorly organized third party.

First off, let's get rid of one canard. Even if Bush wins, we'll never know whether Nader "cost" Gore the election; exit polls suggest that many Nader voters wouldn't have voted at all in a straight Gush-Bore matchup. (And for whatever it's worth, Bush attracted about twice as many registered Democrats as Nader did.) But Nader's very presence in the race, and the enthusiasm his candidacy generated among students, environmentalists and other progressive activists, indicates that cracks are showing in the politics of fear that have held the amorphous Democratic coalition together in recent years.

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