a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment
Herunar  ·  2802 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What do you think of Dr Jill Stein and The Green Party?

Ah, thanks for that link - I do appreciate it. But I don't think the Green Party are not 'participants' - perhaps my wording was a bit too strong. I just think that fielding a Presidential candidate in and of itself is just not worth the time as things currently stand. The Greens have about 135 elected positions in a country of 325 million people, no seats in either the House or the Senate, no seats in state legislative systems, no governships, and no real power in any singular state besides a few mayoral positions. That does not a movement make, and I think that's what I was trying to get at.

I'd look to the Lib Dems in the UK, Podemos in Spain, the New Democrats in Canada, or, hell even the Green Party in Australia/UK to an extent (at least they have a seat in Parliament...) to how to actually build a relatively successful movement in a two party system - the Greens are adopting more populist stances, and I like that, and I truly want to see a real anti-capitalist, progressive party in the States, but nothing the Greens have done shows me that they are willing to put in the years of groundwork to start capturing more than 130 meager local offices.

I also understand that it's hard as shit to break the duopoly here in the US but I don't really think the Greens have taken the right approach to do so. I mean, the Liberfuckingtarian Party has more power than them in terms of seats/offices. That's ludicrous.

I love Corbyn in the UK (though he still has a long way to go to try and challenge the strangehold the Tories have in England in particular) and one of the keys to his success has been creating a mass party-movement - energizing people to join the Party as card-carrying, dues-paying members, challenging them to take on MPs that they are unhappy with them, rallying them to get involved. And now Labour is the biggest party in Western Europe. That's a movement. That's how you change the game and inject real progressive politics into the mainstream (though, I will admit, I'm still dubious as to how far Corbyn will really go).