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By Howie Hawkins
THE POLITICAL DYNAMIC augured well for a progressive third party
challenge in 2016. With the two most unpopular major party candidates in
history, and a large progressive vote mobilized for Sanders in the
Democratic primaries, hopes were high that the Greens could do much
better, perhaps reaching five percent or more to secure general election
federal funding for the 2020 Green presidential campaign.
But lacking a large, well-organized membership base to provide local
legs for the campaign and a sizable cohort of Green elected officials to
give the Green Party political weight, the campaign was marginalized by
the media and discounted by the voters. So the limited gains for the
Greens should not be surprising at all.
Until the Green Party has built a real power base of well-organized,
dues-paying members and elected Green caucuses in city councils, state
legislatures and the U.S. House, it will not be taken seriously in a
presidential run by most media and most voters. It is now time for the
Greens to go back to grassroots organization and movement building.
As we enter Trump time, the Greens and the broader left should learn
from their mistakes during the Bush II era when too many got caught up
in the Anybody-But-Bush strategy to get the Democrats back in power. For
the Greens, that approach yielded the divisive and self-defeating
safe-states strategy of 2004 by one faction of the party, which
undermined the party’s very rationale for existing as an independent
alternative.
Greens should be friendly with grassroots Democrats in the
Sanders/Warren wing as they quixotically try (again) to replace
corporate Democrats with progressive Democrats.
Greens should work with them in the fightback against Trumpist
scapegoating and oppression of immigrants, minorities and women,
expansion of the security and surveillance state, imperial wars, climate
madness, cuts to public health care and schools, union-busting and on
many other fronts.
But the real power structure of the Democratic Party — the corporate
donors and their political representatives, led now by the corporate
neoliberal Chuck Schumer — will do what corporate Democrats always do
with progressive Democratic personalities: use them as bait to lure
progressives into a supporting corporate Democrats as the lesser evil.
full: https://www.solidarity-us.org/site/node/4855
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