A note to the Green-bashers

Hey, since I seem to be in the mood to discuss third-party stuff, let me just say to all you Green-bashers: welcome. Feel free to post in the comments, just be polite. I’ll try and encourage folks to be polite to you in turn (except for Amy S., who gets a free pass from me. After you’ve been a friend of mine for nearly 20 years, you’ll get a free pass too). This is a subject folks can legitimately disagree on.

Just one thing: Please, no long (and somewhat condescending) explanations of how Nader could never, ever win a presidential race. We know. Really. No Green Party candidate will win the a presidential election in the foreseeable future, and probably not ever – this is obvious. All you convince me of, by explaining this again and again, is that you’re incapable of listening to arguments, so you just knock down straw men.

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..

So if you want to argue that the Greens can never get anything they want, go ahead: but please don’t argue it by arguing that we can’t win the White House. We know that already. Winning national elections has never been our strategy.

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