More on the Presidential Candidacy debate within the Green Party
“Strategic Voting” Is Strategic Suicide
by Howie Hawkins, Syracuse Greens
www.greens.org/s-r/32/32-18.html
(Synthesis/Regeneration 32, Fall 2003) — When Granny D used her
speaking time at the Code Pink anti-war demonstration in Washington DC
in early March to tell the Greens “not to divide us” by running a Green
presidential candidate, she was herself being divisive.
Her demand was divisive within the peace movement, which needs to
unite on anti-war demands and not exclude anyone based on their
electoral approach. Her political tactic mirrors that of Bush when he
says “if you are not with the U.S. war on terror, you are with the
terrorists.” There are always more than two choices in any political
question.
Granny D is not alone in making this demand on the Greens. Ronnie
Dugger, Michael Moore, Carl Davidson, Daniel Ellsberg, and Noam Chomsky
are among the other notable progressives who are telling progressives
to support the Democratic nominee in order to beat Bush. Fortunately,
few Greens are willing to rely on the Soft Right Democrats to defend us
from the Hard Right Republicans.
Unfortunately, too many Greens are accepting the sneaky version of
this demand: “strategic voting”. Various proposals have circulated
under various names (safe states, strategic voting, tactical voting,
three dimensional, etc.), but they all boil down to the Green ticket
either cutting a deal with the Democrats and exiting the campaign late,
or not competing for votes with the Democratic candidate in the
“battleground” swing states where the polls show the race between the
Democrat and Republican tickets to be close and the electoral votes of
those states up for grabs.
Strategic voting proposals let the Greens run where they won’t affect
the outcome, but not where they might. The minute the Greens stop
campaigning where they might affect the outcome is the minute no one
takes the Greens seriously. The minute the Greens start backhandedly
supporting Democrats with a cute “strategic voting” scheme is the
minute the public stops taking Greens seriously.
This will be because the Greens have stopped stop taking themselves
seriously. It is the minute that the corporate Democrats feel free to
completely ignore their own Kucinich/ Shaprton wing and take the votes
to their left for granted. It is the minute the whole dynamic of the
election shifts to the right, with the Green Party looking like it
isn’t really serious about wanting governmental power to make changes.
The best way to fight the right is with a good offense around an
independent campaign for a real alternative. The Democratic leadership
is so complicit in Bush’s tax cuts, corporate pandering, war powers,
war budgets, and repressive legislation that it is hard to argue they
are the lesser evil. It’s more like the slicker evil of a Clinton vs.
the cruder evil of a Bush Jr.
Where’s the difference?
Neo-conservative militarism and neo-liberal economics are not Bush’s
exclusive preserve. The Democratic leadership and a majority of
Congressional Democrats are every bit as committed to them as they are
to pleasing their financial sponsors in the corporate oligarchy who
want these policies. Both parties are just as committed to economic
policies of neoliberal austerity.
Neo-liberalism includes cuts in social spending, hikes in regressive
taxes, cuts in progressive taxes, privatization, deregulation,
corporate-managed trade, union busting, and corporate welfare. In a
nutshell, it means the stick of austerity for workers, on the theory it
will makes us work harder and raise productivity, and the carrot of
welfare for the corporate rich, on the theory they will invest and the
benefits of increased jobs and tax revenues will trickle down to the
rest of us.
Neo-liberal austerity is the post-Keynesian economic policy adopted by
the corporate rulers as they ran into the internal limits to profits
and growth under the Keynesian welfare/warfare state.
The new ruling class consensus is the austerity/warfare state of
neo-liberal economics and neo-conservative empire. That ruling class
consensus is the pro-war, pro-corporate bi-partisan consensus. To be
sure, the ruling class is divided about Bush, with some worried about
the economic irrationality of the latest tax cuts, the instability that
his cowboy style of imperialism is stirring up in the Middle East and
Europe, and the domestic instability his pandering to Christian
fundamentalists may stir up at home.
The worried wing of the ruling class will give strong backing to a
Democrat like Dean, Kerry, Gephardt, or Lieberman who will be more
sophisticated in administering militaristic neoliberalism. That is
their fight, not ours.
A Democrat might beat Bush, but no Democrat is going to beat
“Bush-ism”, which is to say the corporate oligarchy’s bi-partisan
consensus. If a Democrat wins the presidency in 2004, there will be no
change in the basic U.S. geopolitical political strategy of military
basing and control of oil in the Middle East and Central Asia to keep
Western Europe, Russia, China, and Japan from becoming potential rivals
to U.S. hegemony will not change. Nor will there be any change in the
basic neo-liberal policy of motivating workers to work harder by
imposing hardship and motivating the rich to invest with corporate
welfare incentives.
If the Greens don’t run a strong campaign seeking every vote they can
get in every state, there will be no electoral opposition to the
bi-partisan consensus of the U.S. as global occupation force and no
electoral alternative to the neo-liberal policies of economic stimulus
by heightening inequalities.
Keeping our eye on the prize
Who wins the presidential election matters little because most of the
power structure is not up for election. There is no election for
corporations’ private economic power and ability to effectively veto
reforms they don’t like by divesting, the repressive apparatus of the
national security state, or the regulatory bureaucracy that is captured
by the corporations they are supposed to regulate. Whoever wins must
govern within that power structure.
What matters is whether there is a movement that is organizing people
to solve their own problems. That was Nader’s central theme in 2000
and, I hope, the point of the Green Party. That theme is far more
radical than the policy positions Nader advocated because to solve
their problems people need real democratic power and that is a threat
to the whole system.
The Democrats mobilize people to win election, not implement
platforms. I would hope that the Greens are about advancing their
program. There will be no hearing for that program, and no vehicle for
people to organize around it, if the Greens do not run a strong
campaign in 2004 against both corporate parties. Without that Green
campaign, the election will be about who is stronger on “defense” and
who can best restore corporate profitability (read: squeeze workers
even harder) to end the economy’s stagnation. There will be no
opposition to militaristic neo-liberalism and the Green Party will have
rendered itself irrelevant.
The Green Party’s political independence is not only about policy
planks in the platform, but even more fundamentally about political
class independence from the corporate ruling class. It is about the
Green Party as an institution independent of corporate money as opposed
to the Democratic Party as an institution dependent on corporate money
and, when governing, dependent on corporate investment.
The big corporations have an effective veto on reforms because they
can threaten a capital strike. The Democrats will never challenge that
corporate blackmail and thus can never carry through a progressive
program because of their dependence on the corporate rulers. Political
independence is an issue of the parties’ class and institutional bases,
not just the characteristics of individual candidates.
Were the Greens to give backhanded support to the Democrats in a
strategic voting scheme, they would be entering into ade facto
coalition with the corporate rulers as subordinate partners. The Greens
would be dependent on what the Democratic candidates said and did and
thus surrender the Greens’ political independence, their power and
their voice and their very identity as a political force that believes
a different world is possible.
Nothing would be more dispiriting and demoralizing for Greens and
progressives generally than a defensive, self-defeating campaign to
elect another pro-war, pro-corporate Democrat as the lesser evil to the
Republican version. On the other hand, an all-out Green campaign for
every vote possible in every state could be the inspiration and
rallying point for a movement for the Green alternative.
These Green alternatives will not be heard without an all-out Green
campaign. That a Green campaign might “spoil” the Democrats chances is
exactly what compels attention to the Green alternative. Greens should
embrace that attention, not try to finesse it away with a strategic
voting scheme that erases the reason why the Greens would get
attention.
Spoiling the Democrats is not our goal. Our goal is to advance our
program. We do not have to win the office to win the debate by defining
what the issues are. If we can define the debate, we set the agenda for
the future and lay the basis for the democratic structural changes in
society needed to replace the corporate oligarchy’s bi-partisan
consensus around neo-liberal austerity and neo-conservative empire with
the Green alternative.
