Precisely. Many of today's Green Party members -- both elected officials like Matt Gonzalez and rank-and-file activists -- used to be Democrats active in the Democratic Party politics. Those who recommend entryism like G. William Domhoff make it sound as if none of today's Greens had ever tried working inside the Democratic Party before joining the Green Party, but it is actually the experience of getting used by the Democratic Party that motivated many of them to seek to create a more democratic working-class alternative to the Democratic Party.
>Yoshie is in the main correct. Leftists should on the whole workd
>in social movements and in Third Parties. I would only add that in
>certain instances it could be productive to enter the Democratic
>Party.
I'd adopt it as a friendly amendment. There are "over 500,000 elected officials in the U.S., and 85,000 governmental units," according to Doug (at <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20041011/023096.html>). At this point in history, it's literally impossible for the Green Party to field candidates in all elections at all levels in all parts of the United States.
>Despite my many criticisms of the above book ["Changing the Powers
>That Be: How the Left Can Stop Losing and Win"], it does argue one
>point strongly: that the electoral college makes all Third Parties
>nothing spoilers in the Presidentail elections. That's where I
>differ with Yoshie.
Abolishing the electoral college and establishing a direct presidential election on the basis of "one person one vote" would not necessarily help people overcome the fear of third parties functioning as so-called "spoilers," though in 2000 Gore happened to win the popular vote while losing the electoral college (which he might have won had he pursued and gained a statewide recount in Florida, according to Dan Keating and Dan Balz's "Florida Recounts Would Have Favored Bush: But Study Finds Gore Might Have Won Statewide Tally of All Uncounted Ballots," November 12, 2001, <http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A12623-2001Nov11¬Found=true>). Suppose that we have a direct presidential election on the basis of "one person one vote" today and that Bush gets 49%, Kerry 47%, Nader 2%, other candidates on the left 1%, and other candidates on the right 1%. Democrats would revile Nader and other candidates on the left as a collective "spoiler." The main virtue of abolishing the electoral college is, instead, that the will of the majority, rather than electors, will determine who gets elected and that political parties will be compelled to prioritize densely populated (and often left-leaning) urban areas, most of which are currently ignored because they are located in states that are "not in play."
One way of removing the fear of "spoilers" is to institute Instant Runoff Voting. Aside from calling attention to the problems of the electoral college, the Green Party's Nader/LaDuke 2000 campaign functioned as an impetus for reform -- see "Pending Legislation and Ballot Measures" at <http://www.fairvote.org/irv/index.html>.
Fundamentally, though, the fear of "spoilers" has to be overcome by political organizing.
In 2000, nine out of ten US voters -- i.e., roughly 27 million out of 30 million voters -- who liked the Green Party's program better than the Democratic Party's ended up voting against the Green Party's program, being held back by the Democratic Party's hold on them:
"An analysis of the National Election Study data by Harvard political scientist Barry Burden shows that only 9% of the people who thought Nader was the best candidate actually voted for him [in 2000]. If people had not voted strategically for the lesser evil, Nader would have had over 30 million votes instead of 3 million and might have won the election, especially if he had been allowed in the debates" (Howie Hawkins, "There Never Were Any 'Good Old Days' in The Democratic Party," March 1, 2004, <http://www.gpnys.org/archives/000069.php>).
The natural thing to do in 2003-4 would have been at the very least to try to organize and embolden the 27 million voters to vote for the program they like, rather than the Democratic Party's, especially considering the fact that the Democratic Party's program had objectively gotten worse since 2000, due to Democratic politicians' votes for the Afghanistan War, the Patriot Act, tax cuts for the rich, the Iraq War, etc. However, in 2003-4, many leftists went into the opposite direction of browbeating as many of the aforementioned 30 million voters to vote for Kerry _everywhere_.
Travis wrote in another thread titled "Stupid Elections, Leftist Cowards":
>Look if you don't have an electoral base that can be mobilized and
>you want to play electoral politics then you better get one.
I agree with you. You never get an electoral base for the Green Party (for example), however, by helping the Democratic Party turn the Green Party members and potential Green Party recruits into an electoral base for the Democratic Party. That way, you are only helping the Democratic Party rebuild its electoral base. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>