> So then a vote for the Greens boils down to a form of self-expression,
> which is what a lot of American politics, esp left politics, is
> fundamentally about. That's what Mitch Cohen and his gang of booers
> were doing at the SSC, too. No organization, no strategy - just a
> gesture of purity that could help re-elect one of the worst presidents
> we've ever had.
Self-expression, for sure. What they want to express -- let's face it -- is the idea that "Bush is really not so bad. Heck, we can live with him another four years." But at the same time, they want to stay on reasonably good terms with the Left, so they don't say this in so many words (at least not very often).
They're in a rather strange position, when you think about it. If they get enough votes to put Bush back in, they will be absolutely blackballed and non-cooperated-with by the rest of the U.S. Left from now to eternity -- left to sulk in their own little corner, and St. Ralph with them. OTOH, if they don't get that many votes, they will be considered pretty much irrelevant, too.
Of course, besides this lose-lose prospect, there is one possible outcome in which they end up smelling like roses (more or less): they somehow manage frighten Kerry into becoming more sincerely populist and forgetting his past habit of waffling on all sorts of issues but voting primarily on the capitalists' side. As a result, he pulls the left Democratic vote back into the DP, Nader and the GP lose support, and go down in flames in November in a noble self-sacrificial finale. This is what they usually say they are trying to do.
Of course, this result is at least conceivably possible. The problem is, will Kerry, having been elected in this way, stay faithful to his supporters on the left once in office? It seems rather strange to me that the Nader-GP apologists make this assumption, since their general proposition is that both Republicans and Democrats are mere tools of "big business" and care nothing for the common folk. But they must have this touching faith in Kerry's fidelity, because otherwise it is useless for Nader and the GP to get involved in the election: why try to push Kerry to the left merely in his campaign rhetoric, if he is only going to revert to kowtowing to his big business bosses when in the White House? Better to simply let Kerry be pushed left by the need to mobilize enough left-leaning potential voters to top the right-leaning voters Bush is mobilizing by his Courageous Leader posturing, homophobic amendment pandering, etc. -- and even then, of course, he will still be down on his knees in the Oval Office, brown-nosing his plutocrat masters, soon enough.
There may be something I am missing that the brilliant GP strategists have conceived of, but if not, I must agree with Art McGee:
> The problem with your formulation is that it acts as if
> elections are a game, outside the context of the effect that
> bourgeois political decisions have on the objective
> conditions of people's lives.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ After the Buddha died, people still kept pointing to his shadow in a cave for centuries—an enormous, dreadful shadow. God is dead: but the way people are, there may be, for millennia, caves in which his shadow is still pointed to. — And we — we must still overcome his shadow! —Friedrich Nietzsche