I think some of us are not inclined to be patient with the GP because it doesn't look as though it is going anywhere, and we'd rather be patient with other things. You can patiently sit beside a dead patch of grass forever, waiting for it to revive, but one might think that one's time might be better spent doing other things.
Of course, we may be wrong; that patch of brown grass might well come to life if it were watered enough. But politics is not as clear as horticulture; it takes judgment. Of course, anyone's political judgment might be wrong.
On Friday, February 20, 2004, at 01:55 PM, Yoshie Furuhashi quoted Camejo et al.:
> Such a view fails to grasp the essence of the matter. Political
> dynamics work in exactly the opposite way. To silence the voice of the
> Green Party and support the Democrats strengthens George Bush and the
> Republican Party because only the appearance of forces opposed to the
> present policies, forces that are clearly independent of corporate
> domination can begin to shift the relationship of forces and the
> center of political debate. Despite the intention of some of its
> promoters, the anti Green Party campaign helps the policies pursued by
> Bush as well as his re-election possibilities.
We who judge the brown patch of grass to be unrevivable would suggest: how long are we expected to be patient until the GP is really capable of "shifting the relationship of forces and the center of political debate," even if we do pour our drops of water on it? (I don't know what "promoters of the anti Green Party campaign" he's talking about, but they probably have a hell of a lot more money and time to give to their cause than I do.)
> Although some claim that George Bush's policies represent only a small
> coterie of neo-conservative extremists, the reality is otherwise. Bush
> and his friends serve at the will of the corporate rulers. His
> standing with the American people can be crushed in a moment if the
> corporate rulers so choose -- just by the power of their media, which
> today is concentrated in the hands of a half dozen giant >
> conglomerates.
Here we see the oversimplified, highly manipulative world view of a certain type of "radical": everything can be explained by the theory that the "corporate rulers" are the puppet-masters of us all. What they decree, in their secret council meetings, must come to pass. Therefore, the only causes of what happens that are worth considering are the string-pullings of these puppet-masters. Until, that is, they are brought low by their only true enemies, the only true saviors of humanity: we, the Green Party. How can you be sure we are your only true saviors, you ask? Simple -- we don't have corporate support.
If you believe in that kind of story, you probably have the patience it takes to be a true Green Party believer. But it just doesn't ring true for some of us, I'm afraid.
> It is in the interests of the corporate effort toward a new
> colonialism to have Bush re-elected in 2004, thereby legitimatizing
> his government before the world. In order to safely achieve that, the
> voices that truly oppose Bush's policies need to be silenced. . . .
Interesting theory, this. What really threatens the Bush machine is not the Democratic candidate, who might in fact have a chance to rack up enough Electoral College votes to put him out of office (unless the farce of Florida 2000 is re-enacted, and I doubt that this year's DP candidate would lie down as meekly as Gore did in that situation), but -- guess who? The mighty Green Party candidate, with exactly 0 EC votes. This is not political theory, but political mysticism.
> There is nothing more threatening to the rule of the corporations than
> the consolidation of a party of hundreds of thousands of citizens,
> especially young people, that fearlessly tell the truth to the
> American people. Only such a movement can in time become millions,
> then tens of millions and eventually win. But it is also the best
> strategy for the short term, to force a shift away from the direction
> being pursued today.
This is worse than mysticism, which after all makes a certain kind of sense. It takes something more than the average amount of religious faith to swallow not only the idea that the Green Party is going to end up eventually with those tens of millions of votes ("Ye have been naught, ye shall be all!"), but even that it is a power that can "force a shift" in the direction of history *in the short term*!
To put the situation non-mystically, political parties in this country, first, second, third, or fifteenth, win support by giving people something. Very few Americans vote for somebody just for the hell of it. If they think they can't get anything out of voting, they don't bother. That's why the non-voting percentage of the population is so high.
So to get to the tens of millions and the ultimate victory Camejo envisions, the GP would have to give left-wing democrats and the non-voters something they want. As shown by the Avocado Declaration, what the Greens basically offer their supporters is the opportunity to feel a delicious kind of purity -- to do good things for humanity while not sullying their hands by touching the Democratic Party (shudder, horrors!). So that won't appeal to very many Democrats. Will it appeal to the non-voters? Hardly; if you're a non-voter you are already pure in the GP sense -- you don't have any corrupting contact with the Democrats, and you can do it without having to contribute to a party and sit through its boring meetings. So I would suspect that the 2.7 or 3 million level is about as far as the Greens will get, since I doubt that there are more Americans than that who feel that political Nirvana is keeping one's hands clean of Democratic dirt.
Neither does the GP offer anti-capitalist radicals anything, few as we are. As I said the other day, if you look at the actual positions Greens on issues, they don't seem to be too far from the left wing of the DP -- the Kucinich people, for example. The GP certainly doesn't aim at overthrowing capitalism. The most you ever hear from figures like Nader and Camejo is fulminations against big corporations. So if the Green Party took over the political system, I suppose its policy would be to break them up into smaller, nicer companies?
(Of course, when I suggest that the GP doesn't offer any group of voters anything, I am referring to the national level, not to certain local situations, where it might be of use. For example, there doesn't seem to be any GP activity in a city like Philly at all, but there are certainly many folks with serious needs that the Democratic administration isn't satisfying, and that the Repubs wouldn't have either, if they had won the last election. Maybe the GP could step in and do something helpful. But I'm talking about doing things that are really useful, that would take a lot of resources and work, and would attract supporters who would be really grateful and willing to form a strong organization -- not just issuing position papers and making speeches, which is what Greens apparently are best at. A rough model for what I'm talking about might be, for example, the old Black Panther Party, of the breakfast programs rather than the guns.)
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, 'You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk-dancing.' -- Sir Arnold Bax