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JOANNE LANDY was an active supporter of Ralph Nader's 1996 and 2000 presidential campaigns. In 1996, she organized a major forum at the Ethical Culture Society in New York City with Nader and representatives of several independent political action groups. In 2000 she was co- organizer of the statement 442 Academics, Intellectuals, Artists and Writers for Nader, which gave enthusiastic but critical support to the Nader campaign. Landy has written on a wide range of domestic and international topics in The New York Times, The Progressive, New Politics, Peace & Democracy, and other publications.
On April 14, 2001 New Politics sponsored a panel at the Socialist Scholars Conference at the Cooper Union in New York City entitled "The Nader Campaign and the Future of Independent Politics" with Thomas Harrison, Ellen Willis, Jesse Lemisch and Howie Hawkins. The panel was composed of individuals who supported Ralph Nader's presidential campaign, though with varying degrees of criticism of how the campaign dealt with issues of race, gender, and consumption. (See, for example, the Lemisch-Landy petition, which gave strong but critical support to the 2000 Nader campaign, on the New Politics website). The panel was followed by wide-ranging discussion from the floor with participation from Reginald Wilson, Alan Sokal, Stanley Aronowitz, and others. What follows are the four presentations (edited by the speakers), along with significant portions of the subsequent discussion. New Politics has long been interested in promoting ways to escape from the self- reinforcing two-party trap that has succeeded, year after year and decade after decade, in moving American politics to the right. By offering an opportunity to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the strongest progressive third party presidential campaign in many decades, we saw this session as a contribution to making that escape possible.