The ironies of the Howie Hawkins for President campaign
It doesn’t matter all that much . . . because the reality we face of enormous over-stimulation and distraction creates such a haze and such a daze that it’s very hard to give full attention and consideration to much that whizzes by “out there” . . .
So there’s very little focused attention and consideration of the Howie Hawkins for President campaign. People who have heard of the Green Party at all have only a vague idea of what it’s about. Few know who our candidate is. Among those who do, most have a superficial familiarity. Many get no further in their consideration than: “potential spoiler.”
Among a 100 million electorate there are about 300,000 Greens. About a million sometimes-Green voters. It’s a small fraction, and among them only a minority gives detailed attention to the positions and machinations of the national campaign.
So it doesn’t matter all that much, but the truth is that Howie Hawkins is probably the best candidate we’ve ever fielded. In objective ways. He’s knowledgable, articulate, astute, focused, and personable. He’s among those who represent the best, the fruition, of Sixties activism.
The 26-minutes interview linked below is a good example:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/09/howie-hawkins-green-party-2020/616388/
Few will hear that interview and my guess is that the majority of those who do hear it will come away, after 26 minutes, saying: “Damn that guy if he takes votes away from Biden.”
Sigh.
* * * *
In subjective ways, Howie won’t have any impact on the race. Articulate doesn’t count. Adlai Stevenson was articulate. George McGovern was articulate. Jill Stein was articulate. Charisma counts. HH has no charisma. Jesse Ventura was willing to be the Green Party candidate. So an irony is: If you’re going to contest at that hyper-P.R. level, run a high profile candidate. Run Jesse and get in the debates. Shake things up.
* * * *
Jesse Ventura would get heard re: open up the system. There aren’t many democratic countries in the world where the voters have a sense of only two significant parties (as indicated by the fact that only two parties are represented in the national legislature). In addition to the United States there’s Jamaica, Malta, the Bahamas, and Zimbabwe.
Obviously there are more than just two political ideologies or perspectives. Other than the above, in all other democratic countries voters are presented with party options that represent “more voices and more choices,” i.e., more in the way of ideological diversity.
In this country a third choice can be viewed as a spoiler for one of the establishment parties due to our winner-take-all electoral system. I disagree with how Howie and most Greens address the “spoiler” “problem”. They try to dissuade or minimize. I think it would be a service to the electorate if the Greens could force a change of the system. A motivation for the establishment parties to effectuate such a change is to burn them. Spoiling gets their attention. Otherwise they’ll never change the system. Spoiling gives impetus to the movement for Ranked Choice Voting and proportional representation.
It’s not our fault that the electoral system is deficient (deficient in many ways: suppression of third parties, suppression of minority voting, the Electoral College travesty). Greens run because we have a distinctive program to present to the voters. We have every right to do so.
Democrats: Change the damn system if our running for office causes you pain. It’s twenty years since Ralph Nader “got too many votes” in Florida. The Greens work every year for electoral system reform. Do you?
* * * *
I disagree with Howie Hawkins in regard to his more-Red-than-Green ideological orientation:
https://medium.com/@stevenwelzer/on-leftism-and-leftists-reds-and-greens-109cac414a4e
Nonetheless, Howie presents himself as a Green and he’s been a best-builder of the Green Party for almost four decades. I wish more people would hear him amongst the haze and the daze. But they won’t. National electoral politics is part and parcel of the Leviathan of modern society. It’s necessary for a social/political movement to try to have a presence in that realm of insanity, but we best not have much in the way of expectations about it. (Relatedly: Best not to have much in the way of expectations about “Hope and Change” from electing a Democrat.) That’s why I put more of my energy into localized building-the-new-world-within-the-shell-of-the-old activities.
