“With membership at new lows and no electoral wins to their name, it’s time for the Greens to ditch the malignant narcissist who’s presided over its decline.”
Counterpoint: The Green Party hasn’t done much to keep people engaged. They killed themselves.
At least the Tea Party had a decent run and engaged with the people who would vote for them. Though, it let MAGA convert or overtake it, but the point still stands. The Tea Party did more in the 10ish years it existed than the Green Party has done in 20 years.
Counter-counterpoint: the Tea Party was an astroturf movement funded by big oil, big tobacco and the Koch brothers. Given massive amounts of support by media companies (lots and lots of oxygen). With the purpose of taking over the GOP and entrenching their toxic industries and power.
With the perspective we have now it is clear that their plan was to push Republican supporters over into fascism (not to say that it wasn’t latent within many of them) and reduce the risks of democracy to the oligarchy.
Trump is gunna win and it will be your fault libs. Just like the first time. You ain’t going to be able to spin your way out of this.
And then the Green Party was a zombie.
Just kidding it always was.
I’m voting for the party for socialism and liberation and you can too.
You don’t need to vote green to cast a third party ballot.
will be voting for the PSL if they’re on the ballot in my state, Claudia De la Cruz is great. if they don’t make it on the ballot then it’ll probably go to Stein as I believe she’s confirmed on the ballot in my state, but the PSL is my first choice!
edit: just checked, the PSL is indeed on the ballot in my state, so they’ve got my vote :3
No, I didn’t say that.
My ballot will be counted for PSL.
That’s the opposite of not voting.
You know… voting.
My ballot will be counted for PSL.
Yeah, you are voting for literally nobody. If you’d stayed at home, nothing would be different.
Cool. Not sure I’ve seen anyone arguing against that point.
And of course you’ve been working all the time for the past four years in support of socialism and liberation? Because of course, you wouldn’t be one of the people who only jump in every four years with a third party vote because they think it makes them edgy and cool? That would just be sad.
A lot of the tone of these anti green posts seems pointed at pushing people to vote for the democrats instead. I’m as anti Green Party as they come, but I want to make sure people know there are still good third parties to support.
As a member of the lemmy instance for privacy and open source, I’m not gonna dox myself, but yeah, I’m absolutely politically active in the off years lol.
You wouldn’t happen to be trying to badjacket people or gatekeep support for PSL, would you? Because first timers and those newly disillusioned with the democrats are welcome to vote for PSL. No experience required.
I have a question about PSL. My organizational background is in labor mostly, though I have done some door knocking for critical elections.
How is your candidate getting however many votes (feel free to estimate) going to help the working class? Or alternatively, how does your electoral campaign help PSL? Is this ultimately a recruitment drive?
Is she really responsible for the problems of the US Green party?
As near as I can tell the EU Green parties had a different trajectory. They initially started winning seats in parliaments on purely environmental platforms. Those MPs actually started pushing green agendas in various parliaments. That, in turn led to more people voting for them. Eventually that had to adopt policy positions beyond the environment and they tended to be pretty left.
The US never had Green party members in a position where they could actually do anything useful about the environment. That means they could never fulfill their primary goal in the US. So when they tried to branch out the same way the EU Green parties did, they just turned into a vague hodgepodge of leftists ideas.
Is there any suggestion that Jill Stein’s replacement would have any chance of saving the US Green party?
The Green party is doing exactly what it was designed to do. It’s siphoning off eco-conscious Democratic voters just significantly enough to affect voting margins but not enough to win. To be clear I’m not saying that Even a significant number of people in the green party have that as a goal, but top down, that’s all it’s about.
We are a two-party system and they are allowing the green party to exist to use it as a wedge.
Every vote for Harris is stealing a vote from third-party candidates who represent real change. By sidelining those voices, you’re indirectly helping Trump win!
Then I guess y’all should starting reworking how your system works, because it doesn’t sound like a democracy at all if you can’t vote for what you actually believe in.
Agreed, but while we’re working on that in multiple avenues, we still need to vote for the harm reduction choice.
We would, but as it stands now it’s an authoritarian dictatorship, right wing hellscape, and a marginally awful moderate right wing dystopia in a trench coat and they’re not about to cede any distance to allowing us new liberties.
If we don’t get at least a 60% margin there’s a really good chance the guy that said this will be the last time you ever have to vote, I’m going to be a dictator on day one and I’m going to imprison all of the opponents, legislators and donors that went against me.
Outside of an actual moderate or left-wing coup which is pretty much impossible I don’t see there’s any way that this country is getting out of this.
America has what I like to call ‘Monkey’s Paw Democracy’; almost as if someone wished for a representative Government from a cursed object.
Now instead of voting for policies they like, voters are forced to vote against policies they dislike or risk being punished my having their rights slowly chipped away.
The issue is she sucks all the oxygen out of the room with her pointless presidential runs and does nothing for the four years in between. There’s an inconsequential number of Greens who run and win elections in small cities and towns or less consequential elections, and none of them have won any federal elections. A real party leader would recruit and foster candidates in large cities and state legislatures— and then get folks to run for the US House, the Senate, state governorships, and then the presidency.
Stein is less a party leader and more a figurehead who basically seems to be in it for the grift. And so US Greens (especially in comparison to those in the EU) are less a party and more just a convenient label for those of a certain bent that want to run as something other than as a Democrat.
My question was more along the lines of the “(not so) the great (wo)man” hypothesis.
Let’s imagine that Jill Stein was permanently abducted by aliens. What do we think would happen?
Would the Green Party just collapse?
Would the former member just join the Democrats?
Would they start a new party?
Or maybe someone new would take over who could do a better job?
I think we’d likely just get someone who’s functionally equivalent.
Maybe vote count is instructive:
Nader 2000: 2,882,955
Cobb 2004: 119,859
McKinney 2008: 161,797
Stein 2012: 469,501
Stein 2016: 1,457,216
Hawkins 2020: 407,068
I don’t think the party would collapse without Stein. They have been around for decades and they have a cadre of oranizers who will continue to show up regardless of results. Stein is just the most famous person they can use for a presidential election, and you can see from the above results what happens when they run someone nobody has heard of.
I think they genuinely believe in their core values, and it’s unfortunate that Stein is their only viable candidate. They won’t ever be a real political party until they start winning local/state elections, but they’re looking to secure more federal funding by getting enough votes. If Stein disappeared then they would keep doing this but they’d never breach half a million votes. Maybe a progressive democrat in the House would smell an opportunity and break ranks to run for president with the Greens. That could maybe get them a million or two votes again.
Or maybe it absolutely does not matter who they run and they just get a lot of votes when the Democrats run particularly shitty candidates for president.
