There’s been a lot of blogging about the Green/Democrat dispute lately, mostly from Democrats. Probably my favorite Dem-blogger piece is “a desultory phillipic” over at Sisyphus Shrugged, which slags me for something I said here, but is a good post nonetheless. Julia is trying to find ways that Democrats and Greens can talk to each other, rather than past each other.
Meanwhile, Fred at Rantavation (whom I’ve just added to my blogroll, in the Oregon blogs section) replies to this post of mine, in which I wrote:
The intent of the Greens isn’t to win by winning elections – I mean, that would be nice, but it ain’t happening soon (except, of course, for the many Greens who have won local elections, but that’s another subject). If anything, the Greens are attempting to do something like the Eugene Debs model. Debs, as you’ll recall, ran for president as the Socialist Party candidate in 1900, 1904, 1908, 1912, and 1920 (running from inside a prison). He never came close to winning an election.
Arguably, though, Debs did affect policy. According to Debs, “the program of socialism” he was running on included “old-age pensions” (aka social security), “the minimum wage,” “industrial insurance” (also known as unemployment compensation), weekends, and “welfare of labor” (the welfare system). He also campaigned for laws against child labor, eight-hour work days, and “securing for every worker a rest period of not less than a day and a half in each week.”
Did Debs ever win an election? Not even close. Did he eventually get his favored policies enough attention so that the mainstream was forced to take some of them seriously? Arguably he did. It didn’t take winning an election – but it did take sticking with the program, decade after decade, until the Democrats co-opted parts of his platform to take the wind out of Socialist sails..
Rantavation’s response (permalink) is bloggered, look for the post entitled “The Limits of My Imagination” on April 21st) is mostly to just contradict me – “yes, your plan is so winning elections” is most of what Fred says. “That’s what it’s really all about, the winning. I think that Eugene Debs wanted to win as well, and not just influence the major parties.”
No, I disagree; the policy is what it’s all about. Winning is just a means to achieving that end. And that particular means, at the national level, isn’t available to Greens right now. And of course Debs wanted to win; but it wasn’t all he wanted, and I doubt he felt his runs for the Presidency were pointless merely because he never won.
Fred continues:
Does the influence come quicker or slower than it would if you took your progressive views inside of the party? If you were to elect a very environmentally conscious Democrat (or hell, Republican for that matter), or two, or ten, someone that actually made policy at a national level (who cares if I take care of my yard if if everyone else uses theirs for strip-mining), wouldn’t that institute the change more rapidly?
Yes, it would. And if spoons were BMWs, then it would be faster to drive a spoon to work than to take the bus. But so what?
In 2000, as I’ve discussed before, the most important issue for me was the sanctions against Iraq, which had killed at least 350,000 Iraqi children age 5 and under. And those 350,000 were only “the tip of the iceberg“; damage done by the sanctions included deaths of countless Iraqi civilians who were over age five, and non-killing damages that will linger for decades to come. In my view, no U.S. policy in my lifetime has done as much damage – or been as plainly evil – as sanctions; there were no American policy issues as important in 2000.
And guess what? Al Gore supported the sanctions. So did Bill Bradley. If there had been a serious Democratic candidate who opposed the sanctions, I would certainly have supported her (or him); but no such candidate existed. So Fred’s question – which presupposes that an electable Democrat whose views are compatible with my own – ignores the reality.
Amp is absolutely correct that there is a valid place for “mid-majors” in the American Political System. And he’s right that they do, eventually, influence “mainstream” politics. He’s also correct that they aren’t very likely to win national elections. But I think he’s incorrect that their energies are best served outside of the mainstream, because somehow they create more positive change than they would inside. There’s this big Mack Truck of a party system out there just idling along, and all it needs is someone to come along and drive it.
Let me ask you a personal question: How much volunteer work did you do for Bev Stein’s run for governor, Fred? (Bev, for those folks who aren’t Oregonians, is a progressive Democrat who ran for the Democratic nomination for Governor, but lost – and lost badly – to Ted Kulongoski, the most right-wing of the Democrats who ran). I did a fair amount of volunteer work for Stein, from stuffing envelopes to attending an out-of-town convention to campaign full-time for endorsements.
Fred, my guess is that you didn’t do much volunteering for Bev, because if you had you would have come smack up against the political reality you’re ignoring. Someone is already at the steering wheel. We didn’t spend the campaign being unwilling to take the steering wheel; we spent it unsuccessfully trying to wrestle the wheel away from the big-money interests that Ted Kulongoski represents. And those folks have the Democrat’s steering wheel locked in a deathgrip.
And when Bev Stein lost, do you know what she had accomplished? Nothing. Nada. Zip. She hadn’t driven Ted Kulongoski even slightly to his left; she didn’t open up the political process for progressives; because she “ran to the center,” she didn’t even bring progressive issues into the debate that would have otherwise been ignored. The idea that Greens like me will accomplish more by supporting the Bev Steins and Dennis Kucinichs in the primaries is a sick joke. I’ve done it, Fred, and I’ll do it again in the future, but you know what? It’s a stupid waste of my time. Progressive democrats can win congressional seats, but when it comes to the big offices – senators, governors, the White House – candidates who don’t appeal to the big-money interests controlling the Democratic party might as well not run at all. (See Dennis Kucinich for a perfect example of how impossible it is for a progressive Democrat running for President to get taken seriously).
If taking control of the Democratic party is so easy, why the heck haven’t progressive Democrats like Fred done it already? The answer is, it’s not that easy, and Fred knows it.
What about Nader – did his running accomplish anything? Well, it certainly put the Green Party on the map, and helped many Greens running for local offices. But in the long run, asking what the Greens accomplished in 2000 is as meaningless as asking what Eugene Debs accomplished in 1900. Third-party achievements happen over the course of decades; our wins or losses cannot be meaningfully judged based on the outcome of just one or two election cycles.
Don’t get me wrong – I don’t think that the Greens are likely to accomplish much, in the long run. It’s a desperation strategy, I admit. But at the point where it is impossible for a viable major-party candidate to oppose the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children, I think desperation strategies are called for. The alternative to desperation strategies is to vote for a candidate like Al Gore, who favored the worse, most evil American policy of my lifetime. And that, to me, is worse than desperation. That is despair..
