Any Future for the Green Party?

by Paul Encimer

I came into the Green Party with Nader 2000 and have been active at state and local levels. I reject David Cobb's claim that as a Presidential candidate he is "building the Green Party." That line looked good perhaps when he was hunting delegates among lonely Greens in New Hampshire and South Carolina. A lot of loyal Party Greens certainly had had it with Nader's independent attitude. Nader expected a free hand and David came along to assure him he wouldn't get that.

David's campaign benefited from the fact that he was inside the party and Nader wasn't. Compare Nader's casual attitude toward the party and Cobb's enthusiastic flesh pressing of Green functionaries and for many it was no contest. Add to that Cobb's "safe states strategy" which promised that finally local Progressives would stop blaming Greens for Bush and Cobb clinched his majority.

Then you get the Milwaukee Presidential Convention where Peter Camejo jumped ship to become Nader's VP — as if this was guaranteed to stampede Green yokels — locals, to the Nader ticket. The only problem was that a lot of Greens feared and despised the big, arrogant California delegation. Cobb as the lawyer for the National Green Party — the ill named GPUS — knew this quite well and this no doubt helped him trump the Ace of Camejo.

In recent issues of the AVA, a number of prominent Mendocino Greens have been unable to suppress their rage at Camejo. Granted, he moves awfully fast. It took some awhile to figure out that Peter's run for Governor in the California primary was as a stalking horse for Nader to keep the clever Cobb campaign from gaining the state's delegates. Earlier Peter got into trouble by leaping without much consultation into the Governor's race, making alliances with the independent Huffington and other unilateral actions that troubled many Greens.

But Peter's not a loose cannon, he's the California Green's only cannon. His speeches are uniformly brilliant, incisive, and entertaining. He knows how to throw a punishing punch in the class war and it surprises me how several of the Mendocino Green activists have taken the opportunity to redbait him. But those attacks may be coming from the same place that has kept these Mendocino Greens relentlessly attacking the Green candidate for Congress, Pam Elizondo. For them, Peter has too much class and Pam has too little, while they have just the right amount — right in the Middle Class that is.

As for David, he does give good stump. His IRV rap on Democracy Now was state of the art, as is his speech plugging the merits of third parties. But when he gets in the ring announcing that he intends to throw the fight, his candidacy becomes worthy only of the World Wrestling Federation. David's "party building" line suddenly trivializes and marginalizes the concept of party loyalty and makes his presidential campaign look more like Green ego building.

Doesn't the fate of that Judas goat Kucinich and his peace plank demonstrate the contempt that Democratic Party professionals feel for the Progressive Democratic Party Chickendoves? These Progressive Chickendoves want everyone to believe that the Democratic Party's sneering acceptance of their votes is actually a commitment to peace! Democratic Party Progressives' bad conscience is then translated into a deflected rage against Nader. They hammer the mouse under the blanket and deny the dragon at the door.

It is disgusting that National Greens have so little spine that they were at all attracted to Cobb's pleas that we don't threaten Demo Progressives. It disgracefully puts the national Green Party as the champion bottom feeder — with nobody, just nobody at all, left to kiss our Green ass.

The reaction of those like myself — for whom Nader was the hope of seriously harming the corporate Democratic Party machine — has been to go out and get signatures to put Nader/Camejo on the ballot in California. In doing so, some of us fondly tell ourselves that we are Green Party "movement building." From that perspective the split in the Green party between Cobb and Nader/Camejo happens right on a structural flaw. The German Green Party was the first to successfully freeze dry the Movement of the Sixties into a party platform. But from the very beginning there was a divide between the fundies and the realos, the fundamentalists and the realists. The fundies let wind-up toys loose on the floor of the German parliament and insisted that offices be shared out amongst the rank and file. Not that the realos didn't worry about issues like nuclear war — they were worried what it might do to spoil their political careers. (Eventually they came to terms with that by running the German Defense Department!)

In terms of US 2004, the fundie/realo breakdown is between "conscience Greens" and "lesser of two evils Greens." The conscience Greens, like good fundamentalists, think Green values mean just what they say, while the safe states realists are looking to see what will sell in today's political market.

As a fundie, it's easy for me to see that Peter is on the right track and David is wrong. The essence of the fundamentalist Green faith is that the Green party is not just another Party. The ten key values of ecology, feminism, grassroots democracy, sustainability, Global and Personal Responsibility, social justice, decentralization, diversity, nonviolence and community-based economics — along with consensus decision making, gender balance/affirmative action, anti-corporatism and publicly funded campaigns — add up to something different than the parties of the totally commercialized duopoly.

A Green Party playing footsy with the Democratic Party won't make the grade as the anti-party that the situation demands. Only a party operating inside an actual movement offers us a shot at the level of revolutionary reformation that we need. If nothing else, playing for inches and degrees doesn't hack it in terms of the threat to our planet.

But this doesn't mean that the California state party leadership cadre, by espousing Nader/Camejo, have declared themselves Movement Greens. Mostly they think that "consensus is a disease." I've watched the state leadership attempt to eat away at the Green "supermajority" process that requires an 80% vote. Up to now this kind of policy voting has kept Green decision-making focused on consensus rather than quick victories. But the California state party leadership cadre are pure realos, always in crisis mode and willing to use normal political techniques like intimidation, manipulation, and deception to advance an agenda long on control and short on vision.

It was the reliance on bare majorities that undermined the decision-making at the Milwaukee Convention. Delegates came as Cobbsters or Naderites and went away unchanged. The winners took over the stage and the losers went into the lobby to plot revenge. No effort was made at any time for discussion, let alone consensus.

The political jockeying between California state Greens and the national Greens has more to do with national power and position than with principles. After all, the GPUS national owes its existence largely to the initiative of California state Greens who were instrumental in founding the first large and loose alliance that ran Nader. In doing so they abandoned the Green Movement aka the Greens/Green Party or GPUSA — which modeled itself after European Parties — with regular dues and sophisticated political literature. The GPUS came into existence as a purely electoral party with the ten key values etc. as a Public Relations cover — hot to take advantage of the registered "Green electorate" sitting out their temptingly like a yet uncarved block.

This California state party in fact is crammed with would-be political professionals waiting for the oncoming paycheck. They know instinctively what I have learned painfully — that a political party is a business that runs candidates and writes platforms to make money. Like the Cobb campaign, state Green leadership embrace their small role in the Roman circus of US electoral politics. They don't question the support their dutiful part in this spectacular distraction gives our ruling elite. They live instead for the hope that as participants they will some day be paid handsomely.

It's the rank and file energy that isn't in it for the money and with whom the hope of a Green Movement/Party makes sense. The social revolution will never be elected to office, but a social revolutionary party... In my view, this party will be something a lot less than a dictatorship of the proletariat but a lot more than a tool of the elites. It will be crucial in formulating legally the gains of the revolution and setting political obstacles in the way of the reactionaries.

The California state party leadership by encouraging us local activists to "go rogue" for Nader/Camejo against the nationally anointed Cobb may be accidentally sowing the seeds of a Green Movement inside their dilapidated party structure of central committees at the County and state levels. The current structure has only served to create a class of "gatekeepers" whose obsession with control serves to keep anything concrete from happening among Greens.

An alternative would be a federated, bottom up structure built on caucuses, affinity groups, district, municipal and neighborhood groupings of actually active Greens, not just wannabe officholders and their managers. Regional spokescouncils could then represent, not gatekeep, Greens of all proclivities. These could include Evergreens for whom party was uber alles, Deciduous Greens who drop their pants for an attractive Kucinich or two, Movement Greens who think voting only encourages our rulers, Conscience Greens who stick to the fundamentals, Lesser of Two Evils Greens anxious to make a deal, Watermelon Greens who are red on the inside, Corn Greens yellow at the kernel, Avocados who claim to be green through and through, Method Greens who want to act out their Greenness, Coalition Greens looking to make alliances and Green Independents who want to keep the party animal at arm's length. Working from such spokes councils instead of a central committees might enable Greens to effect actual change in a sick, dying society.