Ralph Nader
Article
Ralph Nader is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between July 08, 2022 and October 24, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “he teams up with Ralph Nader to implement vehicle safety regulations”; “it’s all Ralph Nader’s fault”; “before Ralph Nader had even hit puberty”. It most often appears alongside Congress, civil rights movement, Jane Jacobs.
Metadata
- Category: People
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: July 08, 2022
- Last seen: October 24, 2024
Appears In
- Your Book Review: The Outlier
- Your Book Review: Public Citizens
- Notes From The Progress Studies Conference
Related Pages
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- Congress (3 shared issues)
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- civil rights movement (2 shared issues)
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- Jane Jacobs (2 shared issues)
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- Jimmy Carter (2 shared issues)
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- LBJ (2 shared issues)
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- New Deal (2 shared issues)
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- Rachel Carson (2 shared issues)
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- Reagan (2 shared issues)
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- Richard Nixon (2 shared issues)
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- Robert Caro (2 shared issues)
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- San Francisco (2 shared issues)
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- United States (2 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
The next thing Carter tries to do is a little bit of everything. Since his campaign was mostly focused on his personality and outsider status, he doesn’t have a specific core promise to fulfill, and as a result, his time in office is a hodgepodge of different legislative priorities. Sounds like a recipe for complete gridlock, but amazingly, Carter gets a good chunk of his agenda through Congress. He deregulates the airline and trucking industries, establishes the Department of Energy, and teams up with Ralph Nader to implement vehicle safety regulations. He passes a sweeping civil service restructuring bill, reforms Social Security, and expands the Head Start program. Oh, and along the way he also legalizes craft brewing.
That’s right: it’s all Ralph Nader’s fault.
To find out, we have to go back to a time before Ralph Nader had even hit puberty—the era of the New Deal.
Ralph Nader was born in 1934 to a pair of Lebanese immigrants in Winstead, Connecticut. Many prominent activists have dramatic origin stories, but not Nader: his family was well-off, and as far as I can tell, he had a happy childhood. The family did, however, have a moralizing strain: when Nader was offered a scholarship to Princeton, his father forced him to turn it down on the grounds that their family could afford to pay5.
Inline links: 5
The speaker said it was complicated, but mentioned a social shift from the techno-optimism of the 1960s to the techno-pessimism of the hippies and paranoid Nixonesque conservatives. The public consciousness rejected The Jetsons in favor of Paul Ehrlich, Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, and Ralph Nader, and this probably had downstream effects on lots of things, including regulation.
I mocked the people in 2019 who thought a conference could affect the Gods Of Straight Lines. But it seems like maybe there was something - an idealized spiritual conference in 1971 between Ralph Nader, Jane Jacobs, Rachel Carson, hippies, protectionists, and all those people - that knocked them off their thrones once. So who knows?