YESTERDAY ONCE MORE
My short post about Jill Stein earlier this week prompted some good comments about the Green Party, and I said I’d write more about the Greens soon. Upon reflection, though, I believe I said most of what I have to say about the Green Party in a couple of Facebook post on November 12 and 14, less than a week after the election. That was before I started a blog, so I’m going to add those entries to STRANGE THINGS HAPPENING EVERY DAY, but I’ll share a combined and condensed version of them here, and then add some thoughts.
On November 12, I wrote this. Short-sighted, self-indulgent Democrats and left-leaning independents helped elect Donald Trump. They bought into the “flawed candidate” narrative about Hillary Clinton and either stayed home or voted Libertarian or Green.
Flawed candidate? Of course Clinton was a flawed candidate. I’m a flawed citizen. Who doesn’t have flaws? You want to see what a really flawed candidate looks like? Take a look at our next President.
Too many people pouted about being uninspired. Too many others seemed to think that the purpose of their vote was to demonstrate their moral superiority to Hillary Clinton. Those are extremely self-centered ways to think about exercising your franchise. I offer this as an alternative approach. As a citizen, your job is to use your vote to protect your country and your fellow citizens. Helping save the country from Donald Trump would have been a nice moral thing to do. Inspiring, even.
On November 14, I wrote this. I’ve already made my position on the Green Party clear. I like their platform, I don’t respect their candidates, and I despise their strategy of hiding in the weeds until they find a new opportunity to sabotage Democrats. Sabotaging Democrats is the unwritten mission statement of the Green Party. And what has it gotten them? In 2000, it got them eight years of George W. Bush, with war in the Middle East as the main course and a global financial crisis for dessert. Now it’s gotten them Donald Trump. Enjoy your tyranny, guys.
Maybe you think that’s a little harsh. If so, show me a list of Green Party accomplishments. They’ve been around for at least 25 years. Which of their policy proposals have they enacted? Why, if Jill Stein was so much better than Hillary Clinton, couldn’t she manage to win at least as many votes as crazy Gary Johnson? Progressives who opt for the Green Party are just grandstanding. They aren’t serious about getting anything done.
Do progressives have options outside of the Democrats and the Greens? Could they start a new progressive third party? That’s easier to imagine in theory than to pull off in practice. Its founders would have to be people who are much more serious than the Greens have been. And by serious, I don’t mean just sincere. Starting a new party from scratch would take years of difficult and thankless work by thousands of people, with no guarantee of success in the end. Maybe that’s why third parties wind up with mostly unserious people.
A new progressive party would have to decide what the Greens did wrong, and find ways to get those things right. And then they’d have to out-compete the Greens for disaffected Bernie fans, not to mention Latinos, African-Americans, and other minorities, all of whom have thus far pretty much ignored independent progressive movements.
Then they’d have an additional challenge – the tendency that Leftist groups have to splinter into warring factions. That’s the heart of the progressive dilemma. How much compromise is too much compromise? Some of the appeal of a third party is that it allows its members to feel like mavericks. Rebels with a cause don’t like to compromise, which is how the Judean People’s Front wound up fighting with the People’s Front of Judea.
[Here are some further thoughts from nine months later, on August 10, 2017.]
A smart progressive movement would stop running doomed presidential campaigns and start at the bottom, running candidates for unglamorous offices at the local level, winning some of those elections, and doing a good enough job to win more elections next time. Elect some state legislators, and eventually a few people to Congress. Do that on a state and local basis for a decade or two, and maybe voters will take them seriously when they decide to run a candidate for president.
Or maybe they could just join forces with (infiltrate, if you prefer) the Democratic Party, learn to live with compromise, and actually protect their country from people like Donald Trump. That would be faster and almost certainly more effective.
I’ll close this post by quoting someone besides myself! This is Tony Kushner, author of Angels In America, in an interview with Mother Jones in 2003.
“Listen, here’s the thing about politics: It’s not an expression of your moral purity and your ethics and your probity and your fond dreams of some utopian future. Progressive people constantly fail to get this. Anyone that the Democrats run against Bush, even the appalling Joe Lieberman, should be a candidate around whom every progressive person in the United States who cares about the country’s future and the future of the world rallies. Money should be thrown at that candidate. And if Ralph Nader runs — if the Green Party makes the terrible mistake of running a presidential candidate — don’t give him your vote.”
Substitute Trump for Bush, your least favorite Democrat for Lieberman, and Jill Stein for Ralph Nader, and those are words to live by as we contemplate the 2018 and 2020 election cycles.