By Donald Gilpin

When he was a Princeton University undergraduate in the early 1950s, Ralph Nader would always hitchhike down Washington Road to Route 1 on his way back home to Connecticut for vacations.

“I wanted the adventure of meeting new people and listening to them,” he said in a recent telephone interview. “Almost everyone who picked me up was an expert in something. I loved that.”

Nader has sustained that curiosity, intellectual energy, and affinity for expertise in the seven decades since that time, as an indomitable consumer advocate, author of more than 20 books and numerous articles, and regular syndicated columnist over the past 50 years. He currently issues daily tweets, and hosts a podcast and radio program. 

Acclaimed by Life, Time, and The Atlantic as one of the 100 most influential Americans, he has run for president of the United States in four different elections. His 1965 best-selling Unsafe at Any Speed: the Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile prompted increased automobile safety standards that “have averted 4.2 million auto deaths over the past 55 years,” according to Nader’s website, nader.org.

On January 30 at 11 a.m., Nader will be featured in a virtual brunch and talk via Zoom, “Restoring Civility and Bringing Social Justice to American Life,” sponsored by the Friends of the Princeton Public Library. Sharing their vision of a more just, egalitarian, and united America along with Nader will be Richard Cordray, former director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under President Obama; Princeton author, lawyer, and consumer advocate Carl Mayer; and Andy Shallal, artist, activist, and founder of the cafe and cultural events venue Busboys and Poets.

Shallal will prepare select dishes from Nader’s recent The Nader Family Cookbook, in which Nader shares the cuisine of his Lebanese upbringing, along with stories about how his parents taught him social justice in the kitchen. In his introduction to the cookbook, Nader wrote about his mother: “To her food was a daily occasion for education, for finding out what was on our minds, for recounting traditions of food, culture, and kinship in Lebanon, where she and my father were born.”

Nader’s recent initiatives have focused on climate change and current political issues, “restoring our Constitution,” “rebalancing the separation of powers,” as he described it. His two books about former President Trump, written in collaboration with Mark Green, include Fake President: Decoding Trump’s Gaslighting, Corruption, and General Bullsh*t (2019) and Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lawbreaking and Lies Betray All (2020).

Nader, 86, who is looking forward to the end of the pandemic so he can return to his advocacy in person, noted that in early February 2020, before the COVID lockdowns began, he visited 102 offices on Capitol Hill in one day. “I was going to apply for The Guinness Book of World Records,” he said. “You have to do in-person advocacy. You’ve got to walk into offices and connect with them, because they don’t return calls any more. Everything is emails and impersonal.”

Amidst the ravages of the COVID-19 pandemic and what he described as “the wreckage” left by the Trump administration, Nader continues to reject the possibility of pessimism. His attitude, he said, dates back to his days at Princeton. 

“When I was a student at Princeton I had to confront the issue of pessimism,” he said, “so I went into Firestone Library. I was pretty dispirited about the state of the world. It was the Cold War, and we could have had a nuclear exchange.”

He continued, “So I read all the philosophers I could get on pessimism, led by Schopenhauer, and I wasn’t convinced. Why wasn’t I convinced? Because pessimism has no function. It has no purposeful consequence and it’s an intellectual indulgence, to withdraw you from civic engagement in order to have a higher significance for yourself. So ever since then, I’m only optimistic. Then we have to fill in the blanks.”

When asked what he thought would be the most important facet of his legacy, the accomplishment that historians would most often cite 50 or 100 years from now, Nader didn’t  mention auto safety or the preservation of the environment, or the curtailment of corruption in Washington. He chose a different issue. “That one person can make a difference,” he said. 

He continued, “The bigger problem is: can a lot of people working together make a difference? That’s harder. We have all kinds of heroic people in our history. Whistleblowing is an ethical effort. I managed to take whistleblowing from being just a disgruntled employee and a snitch to someone who takes their conscience to work every day.”

He went on to recall the first whistleblower conference in history that he initiated in 1972 and his subsequent book on whistle blowing. “Everything starts with just one person to get people to have a higher significance of themselves as pursuers of a just society from the neighborhood to the world stage,” he said. 

In continuing to promote whistleblowers and individuals who try to make a difference, Nader pointed out challenges in the current era. In his most recent visit to Princeton University, for a talk at the Whig Clio political, literary, and debate society in December 2019, Nader encountered a lack of concern and engagement in his audience, he said, and he attributed that lack of concern to a narrowed view of the purpose of education and life.

“I started my speech saying this is the smallest audience I’ve ever spoken to at Princeton in my life,” he recalled. “There were about 100 people. They used to be hanging from the rafters. That’s not really a reflection on me. That’s a reflection on what the internet has done to the students, and the addiction to the iPhone and all the rest of it.”

He went on, “It’s also a reflection of the student body at universities everywhere, and especially at law schools. They look at education mechanistically. They want to get a better job or go to Harvard Law School. They don’t care about a just society. I could go on about that because I speak there often.”

He noted that he thought he would raise their level of concern by warning, “You’re going to be confronting five omnicides during your lifetime.”  Nader pointed out the threats of nuclear or chemical and biological war; the climate catastrophe and environmental issues; the dangers of democracies turning into autocracies; the mass withdrawal of the public from civic engagement and community building; and (note that this speech took place in December 2019) the threat of viruses and bacterial epidemics.

“When I was watching the students as I was saying this, you’d think there would be some facial expression changes,” he said. “Totally expressionless, and after it was over people came up and talked with me, but nobody asked me about any of it.”

Nader lamented the absence of news about local and national civic groups and the failure of the news media to report on civic activity all over the country, “the fountainhead of a democratic society.”

In our phone conversation just days before Inauguration Day, Nader emphasized some of the Biden administration’s immediate challenges. “He’s got to do a lot of things,” Nader said. “First he’s got to roll back Trump. He’s got to revoke scores of executive orders that were unauthorized by Congress or that were bad policy.”

He continued, “They’re going to find wreckage. I urged the Biden people to put out marker reports: ‘Here’s what we found when we went through the door of these agencies. Here’s what we found and we’re going to turn it around.’ Marker reports so they don’t get tainted by the spillover and blamed for the wreckage and the dismantling and the corruption and suppression and destruction of the civil service that Trump was involved in.”

Nader’s second recommendation for the executive branch was that they respect the balance of power and the separation of powers, obeying Congress if there are subpoenas, requests for oversight or testimony, and “not starting wars that aren’t declared and so forth.”

Nader stated that he is hopeful that Biden’s presidency will be successful, “only in the sense that he’s got an easy act to follow,” and went on to urge Biden to confront the corporate dominance of the country. “He has to put corporate abuses on the front table,” Nader said. “He’s got to propose strengthening corporate crime enforcement budgets, to update and expand the federal corporate criminal code, and enforce anti-trust laws. He has to protect consumers and workers with better enforcement and better institutions.”

Expressing some doubt that Biden could or would take on all those challenges, Nader concluded, “We’re a corporate-dominated society, the corporate state. I don’t know if Biden is up to that challenge because he comes from the corporate arena — known as the state of Delaware.”

One accomplishment in his legacy that Nader is especially proud of is the Princeton Alumni Corps (formerly Princeton Project 55), created in 1989 by alumni of his class at Princeton University and designed to place Princeton students in post-graduate and summer civic action organizations. More than 1,000 graduates and students have been placed in paid fellowships and internship programs throughout the country. The Alumni Corps, with its headquarters at 12 Stockton Street, has continued to expand its partnerships with numerous nonprofits, “developing leaders, building community, and creating and deepening social impact,” as its website states.

“We were tired of going back to Princeton and just being asked for money at alumni gatherings,” Nader said. “We wanted to do something. We started it at our 35th reunion, and we would go back a lot. Pretty soon we got the biggest applause by far at the reunions P-rade. We would be regaled by people who had found jobs in wonderful organizations and developed lifetime occupations.”

Digital tickets for the 11 a.m. Saturday, January 30 fundraising event are available for $65 through this link. Participants will receive copies of Cordray’s new book Watchdog: How Protecting Consumers Can Save Our Families, Our Economy, and Our Democracy and Mayer’s Shakedown: The Fleecing of the Garden State. Copies of Nader’s cookbook can be ordered through  through this link.