[lbo-talk] Green Party 2004

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>Yoshie:
>>  It is said that "[a]t least 174 Greens in 24 states hold elected
>>  office as of May 2003" in the United States (Cf.
>  > <http://www.feinstein.org/greenparty/electeds.html>) -- mainly at the
>>  level of city councils and school boards, it seems.  You can access
>>  the Green election results from 1985 till 2002 at
>>  <http://greens.org/elections/>.  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.
>
>There is something in between gradualism and immaculate conception. 
>For example, strategic allocation of resources to capture 
>governorship in a state or two.  Seems like a better strategy than 
>running a presidential candidate, which - as a saying from my old 
>country goes - is like attacking the sun with a hoe.
>
>Wojtek

For the purpose of party-building, concentrating resources on a state 
or two makes sense.  For the Green Party, that would be California.

Unfortunately, foreign policy is the business of the executive 
branch, and anti-war voters and would-be voters have nowhere to go in 
2004.

At 2:29 PM -0500 5/23/03, Shane Taylor wrote:
>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.

A potential constituency for a presidential candidate to the left of 
the Democratic Party seems to exist, among discontented voters and 
non-voters.  (E.g., 37-38% of Americans say that the war on Iraq 
wasn't worth it -- 
<http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2003/05/13/national2138EDT0839.DTL>.) 
Economic conditions -- possibly on the brink of a bad deflationary 
spiral -- cry out for politics other than Republican tax cuts for the 
rich and Democratic fiscal prudence.  The Green Party probably isn't 
capable of running a campaign to mobilize the potential constituency 
nationwide, though.
-- 
Yoshie

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