In November 2000, as Bush v. Gore worked its way through the courts, I wrote in defense of the Ralph Nader presidential campaign “Let there be no doubt about it at this juncture: the Left in the United States will have a party of its own.” Now, with the Green Party’s announcement of its intention to run an aggressive presidential campaign in 2004, it is appropriate to ask whether the Greens are squandering their own potential to be that party.
For the Greens, it is common-sense that the Left in the U.S. ought to have a political party as it does in other Western democracies. The right has two parties, both committed to serving the consensus of the U.S. business leadership. One is socially moderate, the other socially conservative. The corporate parties are ruled by what are commonly called 'special interests', - those bodies who benefit economically from prevailing policy. The fact that neither party thought twice about allowing the likes of Anheuser-Busch to underwrite the 2000 Presidential debates underscores their total acquiescence to their own corporate sponsorship.
The nearly three million Americans who voted for Nader are only the tip of an iceberg. They might have been joined by millions more had Nader been allowed to participate in the debates. But there is good reason that Gore and Bush excluded Nader. Not only would Nader have wiped the floor with them on the issues, he would have spoken plainly to the American public about the policy matters that we care about, the issues that the two party 'duopoly' ignores.
Who besides Nader called for a reduction in the military budget, for curtailing the brutal sanctions on Iraq, for an end to the death penalty, and for the over-turning of the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act? The Green Party candidate unequivocally asserted that health care should be a right for American citizens. Nader campaigned for an end to the drug war and its handmaiden, the prison-industrial complex. The Green Party calls for full equal rights regardless of sexual orientation. While the Democrats narrowed women's issues to the single cause of abortion, the Green Party looks broadly at the gendered impact of the Clinton-Gingrich welfare 'reform', the hamstringing of OSHA, the lack of childcare, and the assault on working women that is embodied in the recent global trade agreements. The American people have a right to hear a left perspective and not have it folded into a vapid politics of the center like that of an Edwards, Kerry, or Dean.
But Nader and his Green Party strategists made a tactical error in 2000 when they brought the campaign to the close, battleground states in the waning days. Nader overstated the lack of difference between Gore and Bush in a manner that has continued to haunt the Greens. The narrow victory that the Supreme Court handed to Bush in Florida casts Nader’s 90,000+ votes there in bright relief. New Hampshire was another state where Nader’s vote total was far in excess of the Bush margin of victory. The Greens were particularly caught up in the allure of federal campaign funds that would have been garnered had Nader received 5% of the vote. Targeting those funds may have damaged the Green Party as much as accepting contributions from Bechtel or Exxon would have done.
Now, as Maryland Green Party activists Diane Cameron and Joseph Horgan recently told MSNBC, the Greens are positioning themselves so that “a Bush re-election combined with a Green spoiler would be the death knell for the party.” In the same story, Medea Benjamin, the Greens’ 2000 Senate candidate in California, expressed her concern that “we have to figure out how to grow and build our party and defeat Bush at the same time."
The irony here is that the founding principles of the Green Party offer it guidance through this dilemma. The Greens at heart believe in bottom-up, grassroots politics in which a strong movement at the base provides the raison d’etre for the political activities of the party. The Green Party at its best is a place of home-grown media, people-to-people campaigns, and candidates emerging organically out of movement/issue activism.
Unfortunately, over the years, the national leadership of the Greens has to a great extent lost its moorings. Since the original recruitment of non-party member Nader in 1996, the Greens have been increasingly seduced by the spotlight of the major media and by the allure of the third party as a political panacea. They have forgotten their foundational understanding that parties are creatures of the state much as the state itself is the handmaiden of capital. Parties can be a tool for social change movements but are limited in what they can accomplish on their own. An effective Left party must resist the impetus toward hierarchy, high profile campaigns, and the glare of the TV cameras (Greens told the Washington Post that they might be ignored by the news media without a presidential campaign). The entire apparatus of contemporary politics is constructed to wrest power from the direct control of the people while giving them the illusion of formal democracy. The Greens are supposed embody the antithesis of that dynamic.
It is not too late for the Greens to embrace Medea Benjamin’s assertion that “defeating Bush is the top priority” and focus their energy on other races in 2004. Greens around the country have, for over a decade, achieved noteworthy success in local elections and a wide array of issue campaigns. Sadly, it is their own party’s national campaigns that obscure those victories under the contentious debates that surround national strategy questions that in the end gain little for the Greens. (Unfortunately, the national left press is not much help either. The Nation, for example, gave significant attention to Nader while largely ignoring the work of actually elected Green Party officials like Santa Monica’s Mike Feinstein, Chapel Hill’s Joyce Brown, or Iowa City’s Steven Kanner.)
It was appropriate for Nader to run in 1996 and again in 2000. Gore should have had the kind of slam dunk victory that Clinton had four years earlier. He was running on a strong economy, against a weak (albeit very well-funded) opponent, and should at least have won his own Tennessee or Clinton’s Arkansas to cinch the victory. The margin of victory should have been there for millions to “safely” vote Green. But 2004 is another matter. Too much is at stake to risk leaving George W. Bush in the White House for another four years.
A Green Party pass on the presidential election would not be capitulating to the Democrats. Rather, it would be in deference to the strongly held views of progressives and liberals who the Greens hope one day to bring into their tent. Frankly, the Green Party ought to elect a few more people to state assemblies as well as a member of Congress or two before claiming it has the capacity to implement its ecological brand of politics from the top of the national hierarchy. The right has its two parties. The Left must have its one. The Greens must respect the urgency so many feel to defeat Bush and put off their own presidential campaign for another day. That is the only path to the Green Party’s continued legitimacy and its only hope to one day wear the mantle of progressive voice in American politics.
Dan Coleman started the first North Carolina Green Party local in 1985 and has served in a variety of local and national positions since. He is the author of 'Ecopolitics: Building a Green Society' and of 'The Anarchist:' a novel.
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