For about 8 years, the Green Party and Ralph Nader have off and on claimed to be building a political alternative to the Democratic Party. It was all a lie. Nader’s recent campaigning for John Edwards has exposed the fact that the Green Party (or Nader himself) has ever actually been any real alternative to the corporate governance system America is cursed with. See Nader Throws Support to Edwards, Blasts Clinton
To build such an alternative, a political party must participate in much more than just electoral campaigning. Neither Nader nor the Green Party have been doing much of that. Instead, they are just trying to participate in the horse race and they are losers for doing so.
Left Activism in America is still at Ground Zero and seems totally unwilling to do the work needed to construct a real political alternative to Corporate World. Until we begin to truly break with the Democratic Party nothing will ever be gained, and we will not be able to build any real defense to the wave of oppression that is coming our way full blast.
Unfortunately, once again the liberals are doing the same old ‘lesser of evil’ stuff. Either way (Dem or Repub), The People end up with nothing but the stick. How long are we going to follow leaders, like Nader, addicted to heading down the dead end alley?
Tony- the Repugs do it all the time, advising the Dems about who to chose. Let Nader weigh in on Clinton versus Edwards. It doesn’t mean giving up on the Green Party. Unless your going to let the “Progressives” frame Nader’s constructive criticism as an endorsement.
I have never been a fan of the Green Party at all, since they have always seemed an incomplete break from the Democrats, if even that? And they have done nothing recently to make me change my opinion of them. In fact, it is unclear if they even intend to participate in this presidential election or not? What are they waiting for one might ask?
And Ralph Nader, too, seems to be an incomplete break from the Democrats. He was a life time Democrat until fairly recently, but is his ‘independence’ from them merely a ploy to push them back into some semblance of pretend liberalism? I think that to be the actual case, unfortunately.
It seems that most of the US Left thinks that only electoral politics is meaningful politics? I think that to be patently untrue, and believe that it is what a political party does when it’s not running candidates that is the most important thing about them.
And what does the Green Party do when it’s not running in an election? Not much, it would seem. And that’s the same thing about Nader, too. If either Nader or the Green Party were active during the ‘off season’, so to speak, then it would be easier for them to not panic and turn back towards the Democratic Party in the leap years.
Leftists need to form a non-exclusively electoral political party with wide appeal. We do not have such a party at this time in history, and that is why the Right can drive all political activity as they do. The Left is simply lost in extreme Left field by being absent from the scene most of the time. For example, I would ask where is the Colorado Left at this minute? Blogging mainly. And that’s just simply not enough. There just is no large Left political formation doing anything much out there. And our country suffers from that.