I'm not a green party supporter, but the impression of them just fielding a Presidential candidate every four years and "not showing any interest" is just flat wrong. Here's the evidence you need to change your stance and rhetoric on the Green Party being "non participants": http://www.thestranger.com/slog/2016/07/21/24371858/the-green-party-responds-to-dan-savage-says-hes-dead-wrong
Hey did you click the link to the response by Dan Savage to that green party response? Now, I'm not saying who is right or wrong here, I honestly don't know much about Dan Savage or the green party, but Dan's response seemed well reasoned too. Assuming that the numbers he threw out were legitimate, it does appear that the green party really needs to amp up their game in more states and many more local districts. Even if he was off a considerable amount, it seems the green party has well under a half a percent of total public offices available. That APPEARS to be pitifully small, as he put it. BUT - on the other hand, unless more of us seriously start considering 3rd parties in general - that will never change. And I don't think most of us DO consider 3rd parties because we get all caught up in that shitty catch 22 where we think we're throwing our vote away cause no 3rd party candidate can never win and of course they can't because we think that way. Ideally, if we all simply voted for the one we most aligned with and not for the lesser of the 2 evils, we might be able to change that. But it's hard to imagine that happening. I'm just as much a part of the problem as everyone else I guess.
Yeah. I started on Dan Savage's side, and said FUCK YEAH! YOU TELL EM DANO! when his original piece came out. Then I read the Green Party's exquisite response, and went through every single one of their links and supporting arguments, and... I changed my mind. Dan Savage was wrong. The Green Party is out there, in the political trenches, doing the hard work. They also are aware of how the system is rigged against them, and have a practical plan for attacking that problem, too. That's why every time someone pulls out the old "the Green Party are just political opportunists who just show up every 4 years to complain" trope, I call em out, and link to that article. Thanks for taking the time to actually read it. We all need to be better informed, and more active.
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).
Yeah... I hear you... but I think there is a unified motive power behind all of the parties that are not Republicans or Democrats, in the USA. The more Libertarians and Greens and Socialists and Whatevers we can get legitimately onto ballots, the less we focus on the "R" or "D" next to their name, and instead look at their positions. When the choice is black and white, it is really no choice at all. But when you have a lot of shades of grey in the middle, then you actually have to think about the issues and the positions. Variety is good. And there are always the outliers - the Pirate Party in Sweden and Iceland actually have sitting representatives! - that give all the other marginalized parties a goal to shoot for.