Yep. And Nader has to run a campaign before joining it, and his previous Presidential campaign never contributed to any serious party building.
Without chucking the torturous, and often undemocratic, "consensus process", and by establishing "decentralization" as an overriding principle, I don't think much will change. Still, that's not to say that I don't respect or agree with many Greens.
> Whether Nader should run, or if the GP should run anyone
> in 2004 is a matter of serious debate in the GP. This will
> intensify. Some say Bush must be stopped, period. Others
> say; run candidates and run them hard.
I helped last time. I doubt I will this time, because yet again there will have to be a fight to first get *back* on the ballot in many states.
That will bleed them of time and energy needed for other organizing, and is not something I'm convinced will succeed again.
> As an active Green, I'm increasingly finding the GP
> insistence on consensus and a bottom-up model almost
> guarantees things can't get done fast and anything even
> vaguely controversial will never pass.
Yes, and, sadly, it's not simply a mistaken practice; it's a defining characteristic.
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> At this rate of bottom-up progress, we may speculate that
> the party will not be in a position to become a serious
> contender for presidency until well into the next century
> -- if we believe in a gradualist theory of incremental
> changes.
>
> However, political parties, like natural organisms, may
> evolve in a fashion described by a theory of punctuated
> equilibrium.
Both the gradualist theory of incremental changes and the theory of punctuated equilibrium remain idealist abstractions emptied of any material content in the absence of the necessary historical conditions of getting one's shit together.
-- Shane
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