Monday, November 15, 2004

Addendum: Helpful Source

One of the people on the 3Nov.com website argued that the Green Party is out of step and not the right party, in part because it reflects "European"-style politics and didn't come organically from the US and that "Green" issues might work as a theme in Germany, but not here.

Well, my duckies, go to Pollingreport.com and you can see that the environment *is* important to people -- in fact, a majority of people (in 2002, granted, but I'm not sure that makes a big difference; it was in the depths of the economic downturn, afterall) said that NO economic cost was too high to pay for environmental quality and regulations should be made irregardless of this cost because of the importance of the environment. Now there IS such thing as "soft support" -- I'll say I support it, but you can pry my pocketbook from my cold, dead, fingers -- but you have to admit, this is an IMPRESSIVE LEVEL of soft support. Definitely more than enough of a base to work with.

And I'm not going to Google-research it now, but people, realize that the Internationalist Socialist/Communist Movement isn't a "European"-sprung construct (any more than most of "Western" Culture); just because we killed and jailed a bunch of our Internationalists after the Haymarket Riot doesn't make it any less US. (side note: I love Wikipedia) The continued erosion of this line of thought, beliefs, and values through subversion and accident (see great accounts in Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States (used copies from $10!)) has nothing to do with its genuine US-ness. The automobile was invented in Germany, after all, but 200 or so years later, no one would say it's not sufficiently US based. All we need to do is rediscover, not create out of whole cloth, the Green Progessive-ness here in the US. The seeds are there.

2 comments:

Q said...

The answer: Yes.

Environmentalists should seek to achieve our goals through both parties. It's not either/or.

There ARE hard-core Dem enviros left, especially at the local level. As I believe we should do in general, we should vote/support whoever best represents our views.

I would imagine most times that would be Greens -- but at the local level, they tend not to run in districts (at least at home in MI) that have very liberal Democrats running, too, if they face Republican challengers. I'm fine with voting for liberal Democrats.

I think our efforts should focus on strengthening the Green Party, as I think that's *the* most important long-term goal. But that doesn't have to stop us from rallying, writing, and voting to support "green" Dems. And I feel explicitly leaving the Dems when they AREN'T Green is one of the best ways Democrats can reform the Democrats -- they'll either have to follow their base, or try to find a base even FURTHER right, in which case, there will no longer be ANY reason to vote for them.

Thanks for the comment (actually a question, I guess).

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