'Future Hope' Column
By Ted Glick
I received an email from a friend of mine, Howie Hawkins, a few days
ago indicating that he is planning to run for the Presidential
nomination of the national Green Party for 2020. Howie’s a good man, a
dedicated, intelligent, long-distance runner for transformational
change, but this is a really bad idea. I’m against him or anyone running
as a Green Party Presidential candidate in 2020.
Why is he doing this? Here’s how he describes the main reasons: “In
my discussions with Greens who are encouraging me to run, we have
conceived of a campaign that would center around two purposes: building
the Green Party and advancing an ecosocialist platform.”
So in an election 19 months from now that could lead to the most
dangerous man in the world being re-elected President for four more
years, Howie and the Green Party aren’t even concerned about what that
result would mean for the disrupted climate and the world’s peoples?
They continue to believe that Bernie Sanders is getting nowhere with his
tactical decision to run within the Democratic Party and have no
problem with the very real possibility that they’d be running against
him? It’s mind-boggling.
This problematic approach that the Green Party has been following for
20 years, failing every time, even on their own terms, led me to leave
the Green Party about a year and a half ago. I continue to believe that
there are a whole series of electoral reforms needed to open up the US
two-party, corporate-dominated, political system so that a genuinely
progressive, mass-based, independent political party can emerge and
become viable, but the GP is not such a thing, and I don’t see it doing
much to get us to one.
I would have left the GP many years ago but for the fact that, in the
early 2000’s after the Ralph Nader/Winona LaDuke Presidential campaign
and my subsequent 2002 US Senate Green Party campaign in New Jersey, an
effective local GP group in my area came together. We focused not on
running candidates but on doing community organizing, primarily, as it
evolved, around the issue of the climate crisis.
In 2003, I was one of the leading proponents of an approach to
running Green Party Presidential campaigns that took into account the
fact that we do not have proportional representation in the USA. Because
we don’t, and because it is worse to have someone like Trump, or Bush,
or Reagan in the White House, I urged the Green Party to use a “safe states” strategy
as a way to build up its strength. Using this strategy, and taking into
account that Presidential elections are actually 50 separate elections
to the Electoral College, the GP would focus its campaigning in those
35-40 states where it was virtually certain which of the two corporate
parties would win. In those states the GP could argue that
progressive-minded people should not waste their vote and should vote
for the party whose values and positions were most progressive.
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Source: tedglick.com
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