Left-Right Romance

Progressive, The, May, 2000 by Ruth Conniff

There are many stories about weird political couplings in Washington. But Ralph Nader and Phyllis Schlafly?

It's true. The consumer advocate and Green Party Presidential hopeful has been getting cozy with the anti-feminist, family values crusader to fight corporate power and the decline of American morals.

Nader's group Commercial Alert and Schlafly's Eagle Forum have helped organize a movement against commercial exploitation of children. Specifically, the groups are working against Channel One, a corporation that made $30 million in profits last year broadcasting television programming into public school classrooms. The company gives away TV sets and satellite dishes to the schools and then charges advertisers top dollar for access to its captive audience of eight million impressionable kids.

The Southern Baptist Convention has passed a resolution opposing Channel One. And James Dobsons Focus on the Family and the Reverend Donald Wildmon's American Family Association have been working with Nader to get the TV network out of the schools. The groups have also joined forces on anti-gambling initiatives, and to oppose the ZapMe! Corp., which gives computers to schools and then collects demographic data on kids to use in targeted advertising.

Call it rightwing populism meets leftwing anti-corporatism, or just plain strange bedfellows. But conservatives and progressive groups have been teaming up to fight "a handful of individuals exploiting the populace of America to make a buck," as Ron Reno, a research analyst at Focus on the Family, puts it.

Despite Republicans' reputation for being pro-business and anti-regulation, there is a strong strain of anti-corporatism on the right. Margaret Talbot wrote about it recently in an article entitled "Inward Christian Soldiers" in The New York Times Magazine. In her profile of an evangelical Christian family that dropped out of mainstream, consumer society, Talbot concluded: "We have arrived, it seems, at a moment in our history when the most vigorous and coherent counterculture around is the one constructed by conservative Christians."

Have eight years of Bill Clinton and the Wall Street boom left progressives so enervated that even Ralph Nader has to go looking for anti-corporate allies on the right? Gary Ruskin, who runs Nader's group Commercial Alert, thinks so: "It looks to me like there's an increase in anti-corporate sentiment on the right, while at the same time there is a decrease in anti-corporate sentiment among some liberals," he says.

In a way, it's not surprising. It takes a lot of energy, and a strong ideological viewpoint, to resist the seductions of corporate mass culture. When I first saw Channel One--the daily, twelve-minute news show that 40 percent of American teenagers now grow up watching--I found myself zoning out, in a passive, TV-induced reverie. The show features a jazzy, MTV-style format, a relentless, chest-thumping soundtrack, attractive young news anchors, and slick, seductive ads. Many of the commercials, which go for $200,000 a spot, are the same ones you've seen on prime-time television. There are funny ads for M&Ms, potato chips, Pepsi, and Mountain Dew, sexy ads showing boys ogling girls in bathing suits, and scary ads for violent movies and the Marines. Aside from the fact that watching the advertising is mandatory--Channel One assures advertisers that kids can't get up to go to the bathroom or turn down the volume while the ads are on--the experience of seeing Channel One is almost mindnumbingly ordinary. It is more of the same commerical culture we all marinate in every day. I had trouble remembering the content of the news. But the ads reached directly to my id: food, mmmm!

It's encouraging, or at least interesting, that people from completely different backgrounds have mobilized to resist this ubiquitous corporate come-on. Of course, Channel One's rightwing and leftwing opponents still have different agendas. The American Family Association adopts Naderesque language to identify Channel One with the tag line, "exploiting our children for profit" on its web site. But the web site also includes the alert: "University of Michigan in `complete support' of homosexual initiation class." And while Focus on the Family mobilizes members to oppose Channel One, as well as gambling machines that target kids, the group's web site also warns members that "schools stock witchcraft books."

Both Nader and Schlafly are quick to point out that they're willing to go only so far with the left-right romance.

"You have to be very careful because you can start tempering your positions. You can be too solicitous," says Nader. "You have to enter and leave on your own terms. You tell them, `Here's what we're doing, if you want to join us, fine. If not, fine.'"

Schlafly is equally cautious. "We [Nader and I] agree that the public schools should not be used for commercial purposes," she says. "A captive audience of students should not be sold for profit. I agree with that. I don't recall his objection to the content of the news, which is what stirs up a lot of conservatives."