MADISON, Wisconsin — On an oppressively hot August day in downtown Madison, the signs of this famously liberal city’s progressive activism are everywhere. Buildings are draped in pride flags and Black Lives Matter signs are prominently displayed on storefronts. A musty bookstore advertises revolutionary titles and newspaper clippings of rallies against Donald Trump. A fancy restaurant features a graphic of a raised Black fist in its window, with chalk outside on the sidewalk reading “solidarity forever.”
Yet the Green Party, which bills itself as an independent political party that has the best interests of self-described leftists at heart, is nowhere to be found. It has no storefronts, no candidates running for local office, no relationship with the politically active UW-Madison campus, which has almost 50,000 students.
Where it does have purchase is in the nightmares of local Democrats, who are deeply afraid of the effect the third party might have here in November. As one of the seven presidential battleground states, Wisconsin is a critical brick in the so-called Blue Wall, the term for the run of Rust Belt states that are essential to Kamala Harris’ chances of winning the presidency. It’s a deeply divided state that’s become notorious for its razor-thin margins of victory — a place where statewide elections are so close that even tenths of a percentage point matter. Against that backdrop, the Green Party looms very large this year.
the Green Party in my state is opposing a ranked-choice voting initiative because it’s not good enough for them and they want proportional representation–when they haven’t even run a non-presidential candidate in my state in at least the past four years despite liberal ballot access laws.
their best performing candidate in presidential history is a guy who thinks mom and pop capitalism is fine, and that the real issue with our country is “corporate capitalism” (“It’s corporate capitalism that I’m against. Not small business, Main Street, mom-and-pop capitalism. And the difference is far more than a difference in magnitude. It’s the difference in the quality of power.”). his theory of change is fundamentally progressive-liberal at best, but indistinguishable from what people like Elizabeth Warren believe.
there are more open socialists in just the New York state legislature right now (8, all caucusing together, will be 9 next year) than have been elected total above the local level for the Green Party (5). even accounting for party switching, this expands to just 9 people in history. this is not a party which is ever going to be a serious vehicle for left-wing organization, and i would argue it is genuinely detrimental to socialist and left-wing organizing to send people to organize with them. i would literally prefer people not electorally organize than organize with the Greens; they have thrown tens of millions of dollars down the drain for absolutely no benefit.
As opposed the tens of trillions thrown down the drain by Democrats, conservatively speaking. The Iraq War alone, which Democrats supported almost 100%, estimated to have cost upwards of 20 trillion dollars. The Democrats’ response to the trillions lost in the Great Recession was to ensure that the rich lost nothing and were never imprisoned for their crimes. The workers, meanwhile, had to take to the bread lines.
I think if you look at Democrats’ governance objectively, it’s easy to see why Socialists and Democratic Socialists are hostile to them, as Democrats fight harder against democracy than they do to enact progressive policies. It also becomes clear why so many Americans don’t bother to vote at all, as they get the same results no matter who is elected.
It doesn’t change the fact that in 2016, Democrats lost due to their own choices as elected stewards of this country, and that will be the reason they lose in 2024 if they aren’t elected.
we’re not talking about the Democratic Party here. we’re talking about whether the Greens are a vehicle for electoral success, and even a basic evaluation of the facts is that no, they aren’t. they lose 99.8% of their races above the local level–none of their ostensible local success, which itself is fleeting, translates above the local level.
again: there are more elected socialists in New York’s legislature currently–who caucus together on a shared radical platform–than there are Green Party candidates who were elected to a legislature total in the party’s now 30ish years of existence. those eight socialists got the Build Public Renewables Act enacted into law (which “will require the state’s public power provider to generate all of its electricity from clean energy by 2030. It also allows the public utility to build and own renewables while phasing out fossil fuels.”) and they’ve pushed for things ranging from the the Clean Futures Act that would “prohibit the development of any new major electric generating facilities that would be powered in whole or in part by any fossil fuel” to the All-Electric Building Act that would prevent “infrastructure, building systems, or equipment used for the combustion of fossil fuels in new construction statewide”. what do the Greens do that come anywhere close to this? where is their equivalent of the BPRA being signed into law?
retroactively correcting myself here: the All-Electric Building Act is actually another thing NYC-DSA won and i just didn’t realize it. it’s pared down from our demand, which was “the state energy conservation construction code shall prohibit infrastructure, building systems, or equipment used for the combustion of fossil fuels in new construction statewide no later than December 31, 2023 if the building is less than seven stories and July 1, 2027 if the building is seven stories or more.”, but the actual law ensures the core of the demand is adhered to: going forward most NY buildings will be all-electric.
We are talking about the Democratic Party here.
As I stated in my initial post above, there are myriad reasons why Democrats are resorting to a meme campaign instead of discussing the actual things they’ve done (and chosen not to do) with the power that we gave them in 2020. They can’t. Republicans don’t have to lie about Democrats’ governance,.
The Green Party is not the reason they are failing. They are failing because of their own broken promises. Workers can’t subsist on memes.
i’m noticing that you’re refusing to engage with the points i’m making describing all the ways in which the Green Party–in contravention of your assertion that they “have to actually work to live”–fails to be a vessel for any sort of serious political action, electoral success, or winning radical demands that would help avert the worst effects of climate change.
anyways, did you know that one of those socialists in office i’m talking about in New York–Jabari Brisport, a guy i know pretty well and who really walks the walk (devout environmentalist and vegan)–ran as a Green Party candidate in 2017 with the backing of New York City Democratic Socialists of America? because he lost 70-30 when he did that (that was a “respectable performance” for a Green Party candidate) and the Greens reaped exactly nothing from him running besides a “moral victory” that they haven’t improved on or built off of since.
and strangely, when we ran Jabari again as a Democrat in 2020, he actually won. and because he won, he’s a big reason we got the Build Public Renewables Act passed–and a reason why bills such as the Clean Futures Act and the All-Electric Building Act get introduced and debated at all (because he helps introduce them and fight for them on behalf of the chapter). thanks to him, there are now material, working class victories that socialists can point to for why people should elect us over moderate Democrats who don’t care about any of this. if he just kept running as a Green, we probably wouldn’t have been able to do any of that. running as a Green was a quixotic strategy that accomplished nothing for the working class, and he’d be the first to admit that.
Thank you for your opinion.