With all due respect, we need to stop deluding ourselves, rhetorically, statistically, and otherwise, if the Green Party is ever to amount to anything. "Tell no lies, claim no easy victories."
Howie Hawkins talks about "Greens" as if he speaks of a singular, unified, ideologically-homogeneous polity-cum-political party, That's a falsehood. The Green Party US is a federation of under 50 state-level parties lacking any sort of ideological, strategic, or even basic discursive coordination. I live in RI, a state that is 50 miles by 40 miles, and I have zero clue about what the Massachusetts and Connecticut parties are up to. Never heard from them once during the campaign, never have seen an update from their leadership provided by an inter-party bulletin, absolutely no idea what they are doing. If the Greens want to actually get elected to federal office in a fashion that would shift things, they need to not just elect one or two candidates, they need to run AN ENTIRE SLATE NATIONWIDE WITH A UNIFIED AGENDA AND PROGRAM! I see no interstate infrastructure in place to facilitate that sort of campaign. The Progressive caucus of the Democrats has 95 seats in the House, 1 in the Senate, and they are brushed aside as an utterly annoying pest by Schumer and Pelosi. If a single Green were to be elected to the House without other Greens, they would rapidly be compelled to either behave like Bernie Sanders, outright switch affiliation to the Democrats, or flounder after a single term due to inability to pass legislation that "brings home the bacon." In spring/summer 2020, multiple state Green Parties and candidates actively sought to thwart the Hawkins-Walker ticket. The RI party, a bastion of the Cobb 2004 faction, issued a hyperbolic press release about how they would not be responsible for siphoning votes from Biden and urged all Greens to "vote blue no matter who" (the laughable fact that the state is dependably Democratic seemed to slip their minds). Alaska's even more dysfunctional party tried to nominate Jesse Ventura and Cynthia McKinney, both of whom have rather dubious political orientations at this juncture. Dario Hunter, who failed to gain the nomination, ran an independent presidential bid after the Green convention, claiming that the nomination was corrupt and illegitimate (or some such nonsense). Those two matters should obviate the objective reality and material circumstances the Greens have to face: Until it builds itself into a cohesive nationally-unified party that adheres to a basic platform and has a modicum of inter-state coordination for federal office candidates, their candidates will remain little more than gimmicks and their discombobulated state parties will continue to make believe they are a single unified national party. Say what you will about securing ballot lines, restrictive access laws, and all the rest, here's the objective reality: Both the Debs-era Socialists and the Depression-era Communists spent multiple election cycles solely focused on organizing in their communities before running for office. Debs had been organizing and leading labor unions for decades, including stints in jail for his role in railroad strikes that gained him nationwide recognition, BEFORE he ran for president. The Communists likewise had built both the CIO and community activism hubs in preparation for their presidential runs. They knew that their presidential candidates could serve as hubs for people to rally around as part of a larger base building strategy. There was no substantial, cohesive, multi-state, coordinated Green base equivalent to the Socialist or Communist base prior to 2019-20. That is not Marxist, socialist, or even sanity, it is a delusion of grandeur in service of a refusal to make substantive institutional changes to a political party whose foundation was always predicated upon a marriage of convenience between dissident liberals and various New Left tendencies/polities. -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#3339): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/3339 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/78103542/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
