Okay, Greens: you ran your candidate and you proved your point. I think. What was that point, anyhow? Oh, yes. Corporations are running and ruining this country, and if we don’t take a stand now, we’ll pay the price later. Or maybe your point was that you’d get national funding if you got more than 5% of the popular vote.
Well, that sure went well. Bush II is president and you got less than 5% of the popular vote. Corporate puppet and Christian right cheerleader George W. Bush is president, and the Greens are still derided by the right as ineffectual and limp-wristed, and are now resented by moderates and liberals as spoilers. What do you have to show for it? The Bush Restoration. Wonderful.
Yeah, yeah, yeah… we Americans have the right to vote for anyone we want, and the two major parties are basically the same, right? Hardly. Anyone who thinks that Al Gore would have governed like Bush Junior ought to be smacked upside the head with a copy of Earth in the Balance. Or an Enron ethics manual. Or both. I voted for Gore, though I was a big Bradley supporter during the primaries. Any moderate or liberal who didn’t quiver at the thought of another Bush administration obviously didn’t read much campaign literature.
Okay, I’m sorry. I’ll calm down. But I do have some serious problems with the Green argument. I’ll break 'em down into bite-sized pieces, because I have a feeling that this is going to be long, and the length of this post has probably already cost me a number of readers.
Moving the Democrats to the left
As a registered Democrat and as an American, I’d really like to see the Democrats move to the left, myself. But this is such a nebulous goal! Think about it. If your party is based on reforming another party, then what’s the point in having a party at all? This is a pointless plank. If you want to move the Democrats to the left, become a Democrat. Otherwise, just leave. Furthermore: you chastise the Democrats for having moved too far to the right, but what I want to know is: how will you know when the Democrats have moved far enough leftward? This is not a clear goal, and defeats the purpose of the existence of the Green Party.
Getting certain political issues brought to the fore
I have to say I’d really like it if the President of the United States were opposed to the death penalty. This is an issue I have long felt strongly about, and would really like to see this barbaric, medieval practice abolished. That said, I have to accept that it’s not reasonable to expect an anti-death-penalty president to ascent to the Oval Office. Currently there are 39 states where the death penalty is legal, nine where it is not, and two where there is currently a moratorium on it. Even though a number of states where the death penalty is on the books don’t use it very often, there’s still a clear mandate from the American people that this should be permitted. Simplistically, you could say that both George W. Bush and Albert A. Gore supported the death penalty, which is true. However, Gore didn’t have as much enthusiasm for it, which made him a much more attractive candidate to me. Likewise, Gore was pro-life but far less zealous about it than Bush II, and it’s a fair bet that President Gore would have been kinder to pro-choice legislation.
The battle for these issues will not be won on a grand scale, but in increments. You need to elect the candidate whose presence in the White House will make it more comfortable for your agenda to advance, and while Gore is a conservative, he was certainly more liberal-friendly than the man the Supreme Court finally appointed. Remember: we death penalty opponents are in the minority in the United States.
Well, so what? If you’re right, you’re right! Right!?! Um… kinda. See, the way I look at it is this: if you want to change the system, you’ve got to affect change from inside the system. Which leads me to my next point…
Trickle-down reform does not work
(Disclaimer: trickle-down reform does not usually work.) And what is trickle-down reform? It’s how I refer to the belief that all change must start at the top and reach people that way. I’ve heard it remarked before that it’s too bad the Americans never had a monarch. I’ve reflected on this for years and I’ve finally realized that this really is too bad. We Americans crave monarchs, of sorts. We have this peculiar belief that the president somehow controls the entire government, and that powerful offices are the only ones worth striving for. Of course, I’m not speaking for all Americans, but this is the tendency.
It’s true! How many of you voted in the 2002 midterm primaries, or plan to vote? How many of you vote in off-year elections? How many of you know who your Representative is? Your Senators? Granted, it’s more likely that Straight Dope regulars do know who their Congressional delegates are, but the fact is, these elections aren’t viewed as terribly important much of the time. Off-year elections tend to see lower turnout, since there’s no president involved. This is a real travesty, since this is where third parties can make a real difference.
Consider the low turnout that your state senate might see, or your town council. Who’s voting? Who’s running? Republicans? Democrats? Yeah, probably. These are low-turnout campaigns, since more likely than not, people don’t pay attention to them. And this is where the Greens could make a difference. Think about it. A Green could easily run where there’s grass-roots support for the Greens and waltz right into a state office. California, Oregon, New York, Florida… all places where there’s enough Green grass roots (so to speak) to get voters to turn out. Furthermore, consider the ways Greens could make inroads into less-liberal territory. What if the Toxic Runoff Mining Company of Backwood, Idaho was ignoring the locals’ complaints about their legal yet unhealthy methods? And what if neither major-party candidate were taking a stand on this issue? A Green candidate could step in and run for office in the area, maybe for the state senate or county commissioner and really make a difference in a place where Greens would normally never even be considered? Furthermore, don’t you think a local resident active in government could make more of a difference for this small town than even a President Nader could?
America was founded on the principle that we should govern locally in spite of what the larger governing bodies felt. Wouldn’t it make more sense for someone who cares about making a difference to run for an unglamorous, local office instead of the glamorous, national ones?
America’s election system is horribly flawed
Of course I’m talking about the electoral college. I’m talking about other things, too, but we’ll start with the electoral college.
For review, the electoral college is an archaic system of seeking out 538 citizens who get to decide who the next president will be. Much of the way the electoral college works was decided by the Twelfth Amendment in 1804, but the fact is that the separate states are still free to choose their electors in different ways, and still do. Furthermore, it’s unlikely that an elector will break ranks and actually cast his or her vote for a candidate who belongs to a third party. This hasn’t happened since Nixon’s landslide in 1972, when one Virginia elector cast a vote for the Libertarian candidate (unless you count a renegade 1976 vote for Republican Ronald Reagan or a renegade 1988 vote for Democrat Lloyd Bentsen.) The electoral college has defied the will of the people in at least three presidential elections (arguably five) and has come frightfully close to doing so in at least four more. So what makes you think a third-party candidate has a realistic shot at winning any electoral votes? And what do you think that helping a candidate like Bush to exploit the system’s flaws would serve?
No third-party presidential candidate has won election since Abraham Lincoln. What allowed Lincoln to win in 1860 was a strong, national support for particular ideas. While I don’t question Ralph Nader’s integrity, the fact is that support for Nader as president is regional, at best. Ralph Nader could have done more for his cause if he’d run for California state senate and became a monkey on Gray Davis’s back—or possibly a man of his prestige could have made it in to the House of Representatives, where he could have made a difference. Ralph Nader was loaded for squirrel and went hunting for bear. All he did was make the bear mad.
Scrapping the electoral college would be the best thing the United States could do for democracy. I’ve long supported direct election of the president, even before the “election” of 2000. I like the French system (despite its chilling outcome this year): vote for whoever you want, and then the two candidates with the most votes proceed to the runoff election. This system is also used in Brazil, and probably other places. It certainly does a lot to encourage other parties, and doesn’t dissuade voters from voting their conscience. I’ll admit that if this system were in place, I would have voted for Nader first and then for Gore, since I would have had no fear that my vote might allow Bush to glide in. I’m sure I’m not the only one. And I’m sure that would have sent a message to the Democrats. Honestly, I’d much rather feel confident that voting for the best candidate wouldn’t mean that I might wind up allowing the worst candidate to win.
Conclusion: think globally, vote locally
I believe in this strategy of grass-roots activism through local elections, and I know it will work. How do I know this? Because I didn’t think it up. This strategy was thought up by right-wing activists years ago, after Pat Robertson’s failed 1988 presidential campaign. Christian fundamentalists realized that their message was going to be mocked and ignored by mainstream America, so they set about getting their candidates elected to state offices, to school boards, to minor municipal offices. A friend of mine in Illinois tells me that there’s a candidate who’s running for her local school board advocating what’s called “Intelligent Design,” which is just a code word for “teach-the-kids-the-world-was-made-in-six-days-and-get-the-taxpayers-to-foot-the-bill.” This is bad news, folks, but it shows that this strategy works. Remember that fracas in Kansas a few years back about getting creationism green-lighted for public schools? Do you think that could have happened without a lot of conservatives and ultra-right-wing Christians in local offices? I know Kansas is a conservative state, but I really don’t think it’s as bad as that.
Local action, folks. Grass roots grow from below, not from the treetops. Reform seeps up; the status quo trickles down. Rome wasn’t built in a day. It didn’t fall in a day, either.
