Nader's Road to Utopia

Not content to foment a consumer revolution, to start up policy-action groups like Public Citizen, to write and publish a string of investigative reports and, oh yes, to run for president, Ralph Nader has written a novel--his first. The title is Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!

If you're thinking the peerless organizer of popular movements has sold out to the big bucks people, well, the book is fiction, see. It's the story of social upheaval catalyzed by a team of progressive-minded billionaires. As Nader tersely explained to me: "Reform can only happen top down-bottom up. Not bottom up alone. You've got to have the big boys to take on the big boys." You need money to make change.

The protagonists in Nader's novel are seventeen elderly billionaires who invest their fortunes to bring about a more just and humane America. As you've probably guessed, this is a utopian novel. Why utopian? Having seen so many worthy nonfiction muckraking books ignored, Nader says, he decided fiction would be a better way to draw attention to his ideas. He also felt that the honorable tradition of utopian novels (Looking Backward, A Traveler From Altruria, News From Nowhere, Walden Two, Always Coming Home) had fallen into desuetude. In their day, such fictions inspired concerned citizens with powerful alternative visions. But in the 1950s the genre came under attack by conservative academics and ideologues, who charged that socialist utopias were a fast track to totalitarianism (see Russell Jacoby's The End of Utopia for details). Also, reformers lost confidence in their dreams.

Subscriber Login

User Name

Password

Subscribe Now!

The only way to read this article and the full contents of each week's issue of The Nation online is by subscribing to the magazine. Subscribe now and read this article -- and every article published since for the past five years -- right now.

There's no obligation -- try The Nation for four weeks free.

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 68 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.
• Reprint this article. Click here for rights and information.