Thursday, February 22, 2018

Does the US Green Party Have a Future?


'Future Hope' Column

By Ted Glick 

I have been an active member of the Green Party for 18 years, mainly on a local level for the last dozen years. Before that I had been working with it for about a decade. I remember the beginnings of Green Party organizing efforts in the early 80’s, about the same time as the historic first Jesse Jackson for President/Rainbow Coalition campaign in 1984.

Some Greens look upon me as a kind-of traitor because, in 2016, I was very critical of the kind of campaign Jill Stein was running. I was particularly critical of her repeated refrain that Trump and Clinton were “equally terrible,” and her bewildering statements to the effect that she had a chance of winning the Presidency. By the end of October, between my problems with her campaign and the closeness of the race between Trump and Clinton, I ending up writing a column, “Why I’m Voting for Hillary Clinton,” and then did so on election day.

Unfortunately, I was right and Stein was wrong. Trump is off-the-charts terrible. Clinton would have been OK-to-problematic-to-bad, but nothing like the lying, pathological, narcissistic, sexist, racist poor-excuse-for-a-human-being currently in the White House.

However, I have continued to stay active with my local GP group in Essex County, NJ. For a long time our main focus was education and activism to combat the climate crisis. Some of us are still doing that, but for a number of the newer and younger members who joined in 2016 or 2017, running in elections is what they want to do.

The position I’ve taken within this group, one shared by a number of others, is that our focus should be on running people for school boards or city councils, local races where there is a real chance of winning or doing well through hard work and smart organizing. We should not be running candidates for Congress who have zero chance of winning and little chance of getting more than a few percentage point share of the vote. Campaigns like that show weakness, not growing strength.

Click here for the full article. 

Source: tedglick.com

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