I was completely wrong.
I admit going off of things I’d been told about the Green party years ago instead of looking them up.
Gee, what a pity Murder, Inc. isn’t still in business. They might give us a bulk discount. 
And this is why the Green Party in many countries has such trouble getting traction; The public has been fed a bunch of complete bullshit about them for so many years, it’s hard for many members of the public to get past the smear campaign against them.
Yeah, for years I’ve trumped my 10-20-30 plan. It goes like this:
Wanna start a third party? Spiffy. Run candidate on a purely local level until you control 10% of the local government. Then run candidates from those 10% localities on a state level, until you control 20% of a state government. Then run congressional candidates from those states, until you control 30% of congress. Then run a presidential candidate.
Leapfrogging this process smacks of saviorism and vanguardism. Start locally, build your base, and do it right. I’m all about ending the two-part system, because it sucks serious ass, but you can’t start at the presidential level. You’ll just fuck things up worse if you try.
To be fair, while I didn’t think bad things about them, I just considered them irrelevant - nice, but irrelevant. Having now read their platform, I think they’re nice, and that they have some great ideas, but still irrelevant.
Except that their actual platform is, as I pointed out, significantly left of Bernie Sanders, who gets a lot of flack (notably on this board) for being a far-left firebrand. It’s easy to say ‘oh, there’s a smear campaign, that’s why no one likes them’, but if people actually look at their platform there’s a lot to disagree with - especially for people who aren’t already extreme left by US (or this board) standards.
Third parties love to blame disinformation, or not being welcomed at debates, or media unfairness, but the reality is that if people take an actual look at them they tend to just fall flat.
Speaking of debates, Howie Hawkins drove his Hyundai Elantra to Cleveland (per our Syracuse paper) and will stand outside the university to protest his exclusion from the debates. He then rambled on to a reporter from the Syracuse paper.
And Howie will be doing a livestream video from his Facebook page with his response.
In case anyone is interested, here’s the link. They give five free stories a week if you’re not a subscriber, so I don’t think anyone should have a problem reading it.
I agree, the fact that third parties are unable to get local support is a good indication that they don’t actually have significant support. “We got 4% of voters to vote for us in a race they knew we wouldn’t win” doesn’t indicate that you’ve got anyone who actually supports your policies, just that they liked being able to vote for someone else. If you can’t demonstrate that there’s anyone who wants you in charge of anything, why should the people who might actually win take you seriously and debate you? They may as well debate random street-corner ranters.
I’m not even sure it indicates they don’t have real support. I think, rather, it indicates that they’re not politically savvy. One of my favorite activists (my state union veep) often says that he refuses to fight the good fight: he fights to win. That is, if he does everything right and doesn’t achieve his objectives, he didn’t do everything right.
A lot of activists, including a lot of third party activists, fight the good fight. As long as they feel like they did good, even if they lose, they did just fine.
I could design a third party entirely around polling results, create an algorithmically unassailable platform. If I ran this new party on the national level, it’d bomb. It’s not just about having support for one’s positions, it’s about building the infrastructure necessary.
Having a been a registered Green for a decade or so, I will say that they are marginally more effective at the local level, very occasionally able to influence local politics and laws. At one town I lived in, they even held a majority of the city council for a while. Overall, though, I think it’s fair to think of the Greens as a protest party, “fuck the Dems” style, rather than any viable organization for power. Even as a GP member, many of our presidential nominees haven’t been great, but they at least vaguely pay lip service to my values. My vote for president in 2008, for example, went to a black woman who was running an Israeli naval blockade to deliver supplies while her opponents were engaging in oral fluffery. That’s the kind of leader I want in charge, willing to take charge and do what’s right, popularity contests and algorithms be damned – kinda like a Bush of the Left. (But decided NOT someone like Trump, whose ideology is “destroy the democracy”, not left/right).
In reality, having attended many GP meetings, it’s mostly a bunch of cloistered old hippies dreaming of a better tomorrow but without the strategy to ever achieve it.
As someone mentioned above, organizations like the DSA today have very similar platforms – environmental justice, redistribution of wealth, increased democratic participation – and a much more coherent internal political structure and the ability to strategize nationally. And in response, the Right has been far more afraid the “socialist” boogeyman than they ever were of the Greens. AOC did more in a few years than the Greens have in 50 years.
Sheesh…even the green party is running an old white man.
I’d vote that the guy who uses the rebuttal to Argument A as though it’s a rebuttal to Argument A’ is the one being disingenuous.
ISTM that, Duverger’s Law being what it is, the Greens would be better advised to assist with the eventual elimination of the Republican Party, considering that the Democratic Party will inevitably schism once the GOP has been liquidated. That’s their best chance of emerging as one of the two parties that Duverger demands.
If the Green party wants me to take them seriously:
- Give me a candidate that isn’t a boring-as-shit loser
- Show me they actually know the difference between President and King. I look at their platform and wonder how they plan to get jack done when they have next to no political support in the House, the Senate or the Supreme Court. I have to ask if they think the office comes equipped with a genie.
- Try to gather up at least a smidgen of integrity and self-respect and quit letting the GOP play you like puppets.
That’s a good point - the big, sweeping radical changes that they put in their platform really need a willing Congress and possibly Supreme Court to put into place. The Libertarians do have the advantage over them that, as we’ve seen with Trump, the president can stop or slow down Federal agencies from functioning. A hypothetical Green president couldn’t do that for most of the Green platform, as it would need new laws and funding for their objectives.
I disagree. Things were slowly getting better. Even under Nixon, Reagan, and Bush Jr., things continued to slowly get better. Trump is the first president to actually drag us backwards in over a hundred years. I don’t know enough about Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover to be entirely certain, but my guess is the last time a POTUS moved the country backwards was probably Woodrow Wilson.
Because Yeezy is failing to do that job.
I think at one point the Green Party might have been reputable, but ever since I learned the last Green Party presidential candidate was a Russian puppet, I figured the party should fade away. Real greens can do something else, like join the Democratic Party.
You and I have a different idea of what “backwards” means, especially relative to the forward momentum of society and culture at large.
Expand on this kinda vague thought, please.
And here’s a good example of the DSA internal squabbling, with third parties there’s often this sort of stuff over issues like housing.
https://twitter.com/henrykraemer/status/1311342549131341824?s=21
Just like the Greens themselves has a huge intraparty squabble this year about their candidate nomination