back to Square One

So now the Greens are back to contemplating who to run for president.

My own most most frustrating thing within the Green Party milieu is an organizational tendency toward marginalist thinking. We get a lot of bad press on that account. I guess in this country, where alternative-party politics is so hard, so fraught, and so negligible, many can’t even imagine becoming a real force.

I wish more Greens would appreciate how the presidential campaign stage is something special. We should dare to try to be significant at that level. It requires getting into the media. But, meanwhile, I know that it’s not easy to find a prominent candidate who is also a committed party-builder. Quite a challenge. I was hoping Cornel West would notice that Ralph Nader ultimately left behind no political legacy. Nader said his hero was Norman Thomas. But Thomas buckled down (and reined in his ego) in order to do the hard organizational work. Nader did not. And now Cornel is just prioritizing “doing his own thing … with no organizational encumbrance” (he said to Tim Black).

Building a viable and enduring organization (an alternative party) ought to be the highest priority. Jill Stein understands that. Howie Hawkins does, too, but he was not able to generate the kind of media presence a significant presidential campaign requires.

Our candidate-selection challenge (at that level) is a function of how hard third party politics is in this country.