After dedicating most of his life to advocacy work through the numerous citizen groups he has founded, Ralph Nader entered the 2000 presidential campaign as a candidate for the progressive Green Party. In his acceptance speech he vowed to serve the yearnings of all those who "see justice as the great work of human beings on Earth, who understand that community and individual fulfillment can be mutually reinforcing, who respect the urgent necessity to wage peace, to protect the environment, to end poverty, and to preserve values of the spirit for future generations."

At the outset, Nader notes that both the Republicans and the Democrats are proxies for big business. They have "given away the store" to corporations through tax breaks, deregulation, privatization, subsidies, reduced law enforcement, and limitations on law suits. Of course, his criticism of " the corporatization of America" didn't sit well with the owners of the media. Nader's campaign was given very little coverage despite the fact that a majority of voters polled in 1999 wanted a viable third party in America to keep the other two parties honest.

Seeking to enrich the public dialogue, Nader covered subjects not treated in the presidential debates such as corporate globalization, universal health insurance, consumer protection, exploitation of the tax-paying poor, the destructive war on drugs, solar and other renewable energy, the bloated military budget, the death penalty, and work-related injuries.

Shut out of the presidential debates, ignored by the major media, Nader still managed to garner 3 million votes. But this small number was puzzling to many, including us. For years we have heard about the clout of the "cultural creatives," a new cohort of some 50 million Americans identified in studies and books by sociologist Paul H. Ray and psychologist Sherry Ruth Anderson. According to those promoting them, the CC's were the avatars of a new society, an America dedicated to ecology, social justice, and peace. That sounds remarkably like Nader's platform. So where were the 50 million CC's in 2000? Nowhere to be found. Perhaps the CC's disappeared with the other turn-of-the-century interests, like Y2K and the scandals of the Clinton Administration.