Extracts from an email posted to one of the ISwitched.Org mailing lists…
[Here are a couple of quotes which summarize my point of view:
“This isn’t a day at the races. This is my four year old daughter’s future. If a Democrat isn’t going to save the Earth’s environment and create world peace, it doesn’t matter whether he can win because my daughter won’t have a future.”
and
“I truly believe that Democrats and Republicans have more in common with each other than Greens have in common with even liberal Democrats.”
In summary: Greens are fundamentally different. WE are the real “opposition party”. This is why all the liberal Democrat whining in the world will never convince us to switch back.
-Thomas]
I talk to these people who get so incredibly mad at me for suggesting the Greens should run their own candidate and that a Green candidate has a good chance of winning. It really amuses me a lot! It used to devastate me. I got over allowing other people to make me feel bad because of my political preference. Now it seems like nothing more than a violation of my basic civil rights as a citizen and a voter. I don’t care if my Green affiliation upsets people any more than I would care if people took offense at my sexual orientation or my skin color. They have no right to tell me that I have to compromise my very soul when I go into that polling booth because their political calculations and predictive claims are somehow superior to mine. I just find it hilarious when people say, “We agree with your ideas, but you can’t win.” I guess rejecting the paradigm of life as competition helps me with that. This isn’t a day at the races. This is my four year old daughter’s future. If a Democrat isn’t going to save the Earth’s environment and create world peace, it doesn’t matter whether he can win because my daughter won’t have a future. That’s my contention. So my candidate just can’t win? So what? What makes your candidate so very special that I can’t choose my own candidate? I say that your candidate can’t win. So there. By the way, who in the heck IS your candidate, and why is your candidate going to win? Because he has a party machine behind him, a party machine that’s been in place for well over a century now? I’m afraid I find that utterly unconvincing. At one time neither of the two current mainstream parties existed. They both had to come into being at one time. I think now is the time the Green Party is coming into being and about to replace one of the other parties or establish a triumvirate on the way to multiparty or even nonpartisan democracy.
[deletia]
I don’t think that Bush has changed that much since 2000, and from my vantage point, Clinton’s policies were basically a continuation of Reagan-Bush policies and the current Bush is basically moving along the same continuum, stressing basically the same things, a natural outcome of the previous administration. To quote Al Gore, “Bush is my commander-in-chief.” Bush does not appear to me to have changed much and he still doesn’t appear that different from someone like Howard Dean. The Clinton administration failed to pull itself out from under the Cold War mentality, even while it boasted to have won the Cold War and become “the world’s only superpower” and the Bush administration is continuing this policy using the War on Terrorism as an excuse to engage in Cold War like military tactics, with almost complete and total Democratic complicity. Dean has vowed to maintain current levels of military spending and Kucinich has vowed to cut military spending by only 15%. They seem to me like children who enjoy playing war games or stunted adults who can’t understand the consequences of brinkmanship. Dean reminds me of Nixon who opposed the Vietnam war but continued it and expanded upon it.
Domestically, the Republicans and Democrats are very similar too. They both blindly value economic growth at the expense of income inequality and environmental devastation. They both believe that the world’s currencies should be directed by forces represented by multiconglomerates represented by such undemocratic institutions as the World Bank, the WTO and the Federal Reserve. Yes, I truly believe that Democrats and Republicans have more in common with each other than Greens have in common with even liberal Democrats. It is time the latter recognize this and either change their tune dramatically, as we don’t expect them to do, or simply bail out.
