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HOWIE HAWKINS of Syracuse, New York was the Green Party candidate for state comptroller in 1998 and currently serves as one of two Green Party of New York representatives to the national committees of both the Green Party USA and the Association of State Green Parties.
WHEN RON DANIELS WAS TRYING TO PULL TOGETHER an independent rainbow coalition around his presidential campaign in 1992, he would extol the Green stripe of the coalition he envisioned by saying that "the Greens were the best kept secret in American politics." Daniels was more perceptive than many on the left in realizing that the Greens were becoming a viable independent political movement. Indeed, of all the stripes in that coalitional vision, the Greens have come the furthest in establishing themselves as a permanent fixture in American elections.
By 1992, the Greens had been organizing for eight years in the U.S. They had scores of local groups active in a wide range of environmental, peace, and social justice campaigns. They had elected dozens of Greens to local school boards, planning commissions, and municipal and county councils. Alaska Greens had a ballot line and California and Hawaii Greens were about to acquire them. What was perhaps most significant was that the Greens were taking root in communities where there had not been any independent left in generations, if ever. The Greens were having an impact, even electing people, in places like Bayfield County in northern Wisconsin, the big island of Hawaii, and Gloucester, Massachusetts, as well as the college towns and the liberal enclaves of metropolitan areas that one might expect.
The Greens were no longer a secret once Ralph Nader became the Green Party presidential candidate in 1996. What started out on Nader's part as a willingness to enter the California Green Party primary to send a message to Clinton and the Democrats quickly mushroomed into a nationwide effort on the part of Greens to draft Nader to run a national campaign. The pre-existence of a network of grassroots Green groups enabled the Draft Nader movement among the Greens to put him on the ballot in 22 states and the District of Columbia. Spending less than $5,000 in order to avoid filing with the Federal Elections Commission (FEC),1 Nader nonetheless received over 680,000 votes, the most for an independent party candidate to the left of the Democrats since the Wallace campaign of 1948.
Having made it on to the national media radar screen, subsequent electoral achievements by the Greens began to receive national media attention. The Greens made a minor media splash in the wake of the Nader campaign when, in November 1996, the first Green-majority city council in the U.S. was elected in Arcata, a college town in the heart of "ecotopia" in northern California redwood country.
More attention was given to the 17% that Carol Miller received in May 1997 in a special election to fill the northern New Mexico congressional seat vacated by Bill Richardson when Clinton appointed him as UN Ambassador. Miller's 17% was far more than the 2% margin of victory for the Republican in what was considered a safe Democratic district. Miller's "spoiler" role in this election followed up on the 1994 gubernatorial race where the Green candidate, Roberto Mondragon, had received 10% of the vote, which was more than the Republican's margin of victory over the Democrat. Then in June 1998, Bob Anderson, running in another congressional district special election in the Albuquerque area, polled 15% of the vote, again far more than the Republican's 6% margin of victory. Even though New Mexico Democrats have a two to one registration advantage over the Republicans, since 1994 they had now lost the governorship and two congressional seats to Republicans due to the substantial Green vote.
At this point, not only was the media paying attention, so were the highest councils of the Democratic Party. Both Miller and Anderson were campaigning for U.S. Representative in their respective districts for the November 1998 general election. Richard Gephardt called Bob Anderson personally and appealed to him without success to withdraw from the race. Hillary Clinton and Al Gore came out to New Mexico to campaign for the Democrats, with Clinton instructing voters that "this is a race between the Republican and the Democrat," which, of course, was like saying don't think about pink elephants. The Democrats also approached Ralph Nader and urged him to use his influence to stop the New Mexico Greens from "spoiling" more races for the Democrats. Nader responded by going to New Mexico to campaign for the Greens. As he had often said during his presidential race in 1996, "You can't spoil a system that is already rotten."
In New Mexico itself, the Democrats responded to the Green specter by putting their more liberal faces forward. Fred Harris, the former "new populist" senator and presidential candidate, was appointed the chair of the state Democratic Party. In Carol Miller's race, the Democrats replaced Eric Serna, a former Corporations Commissioner widely regarded as a corporate lap dog, with Tom Udall, son of Stewart and nephew of Mo, whose name gave him a liberal veneer if not substance. But in Anderson's race, the Democrats stuck with Phil Maloof, the 31-year old scion of one of New Mexico's wealthiest families who had spent $3.1 millions of his own money on the first race. The Democrats' tactics did succeed in the Miller race, where her total dropped from 17% to 4% and the Democrat Udall won. But Anderson still received 11%, far more than the 3% Republican margin of victory.
Greens made the supermarket tabloids for the first time in 1998 when Al Lewis, known to most as "Grandpa" on the TV sitcom "The Munsters," was nominated by the Green Party of New York for governor. A sad but true observation about the state of the corporate mass media is that the tabloid stories told more about Lewis' platform than most of the campaign stories in the mainstream corporate papers. Nonetheless, voters soon found out that Lewis was an 88-year-old lifelong radical who had demonstrated for Sacco and Vanzetti and was still demonstrating, now for Mumia Abu-Jamal. Running for Lieutenant Governor was Alice Green, an African-American activist well-known for her work against police brutality, racism in the criminal justice system, and the growing Prison/Industrial Complex. The prize in the 1998 election for New York Greens was the 50,000 votes needed for a ballot line for the next four years. But even though attempts were made to build a united electoral front for the governor's race, there were six parties to the left of the Democrats on the ballot. Spending only $15,000, the Greens had to rely on their grassroots network of 22 local chapters across the state to pull 52,478 votes on election day. By comparison, of the other two parties to the left of the Democrats who secured a ballot line, the Liberal candidate spent $2.3 million and the Working Families candidates, the Democratic ticket, spent tens of millions of dollars on their campaigns, while Working Families itself went $100,000 into debt and still finished behind the Greens in the gubernatorial vote.
The most recent media splash for the Greens was the March 30, 1999 election of Audie Bock in a special election to the California State Assembly in a stunning victory over the liberal Democratic machine in Oakland and Berkeley, California. Beating a 12-year state assemblyman and two-term Oakland mayor named Elihu Harris, Bock became the first third party state legislator in California since 1914. A close political ally of San Francisco Mayor and former State Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, Harris took his victory for granted during the campaign. While Bock and her volunteers hit the streets, Harris barely campaigned, avoided debates, and indulged in speculation that he might become the Speaker once elected. In the Democratic primary, Harris had hurt himself by insulting black voters when his campaign offered free chicken dinners in the black community to anyone producing a voting stub. The race had opened up when Congressman Ron Dellums retired, sparking a re-shuffling of seats by politicians in the East Bay Democratic machine. Harris's assumption of the now vacated Assembly seat was the last move. But Bock hammered away on her campaign issues of more school funding, universal health care, and closing corporate tax loopholes, and built a grassroots organization that won 50.5% to 49.5% on election day.
One is the international scope of the Green Party movement. With Greens sitting in the national legislatures of 12 European states and participating in governing coalitions of the "plural left" with socialists, communists, and/or others in Germany, France, Italy, Finland, Poland, and Georgia, Greens in the U.S. and around the world have had their spirits sustained as they organize in more trying circumstances. Greens in the U.S. have also been inspired by the election to national legislatures of Greens in Brazil, Mexico, New Zealand, and Australia. U.S. Greens have joined with Greens throughout the Americas to form the Federation of Green Parties of the Americas. They have observed meetings of the European Federation of Green Parties and of the Federation of Green Parties of Africa. They are participating in the discussions and organizing leading up to the first world conference of Green Parties slated for Canberra, Australia in the spring of 2001. When U.S. Greens were resisting the proposed dumping of radioactive waste from nuclear power plants in Vermont and Maine in a low-income Chicano community in West Texas 15 miles from the Rio Grande last year, it was heartening to be able to join with Partido Verde Ecologista de Mexico in joint statements and demonstrations against the radioactive waste dump. Even when the Greens here sent an open letter of protest to Joschka Fischer, the German Green serving as Foreign Minister, appealing to him to withdraw support for the NATO bombing campaign in Yugoslavia, it gave Greens a feeling that they were no longer shouting protests from the margins but had a standing that made their voices count.
The other factor sustaining the Green Party movement in the U.S. is several thousand Green activists and the widely varied community-based movements in which they participate. The Greens do not have the institutionalized union base of the Labor Party or the community organizing base of ACORN sustaining the New Party, not to mention the corporate financing of the "Dumublicans and Repugnicrats," as the major parties are known among Greens. What the Greens do have is a grassroots network of a few thousand activists who are engaged in broader community-based movements. Most of these Green activists have roots in social movements, most often the environmental, peace, and women's movements, less often the labor, community organizing, and people of color movements. A sprinkling of Green activists have come out of various currents of the ideological left and a few out of Democratic electoral politics. For most Greens, however, the Green Party is a logical extension of their movement activities and their first serious participation in electoral politics.
Non-electoral "movement" education, organizing, and actions are seen as the foundation for effective Green electoral campaigns. The range of this movement work is wide. The activities I heard about in the four days before I sat down to write this will give a sense of this non-electoral work, even though it can be assumed to be just a fraction of what Greens were doing. On Friday, Greens in St. Louis dumped milk with recombinant bovine growth hormone at the annual shareholders meeting of Monsanto as part of a Global Days of Action Against Genetic Engineering sponsored by Greens and other groups in Europe and North America. In Syracuse, Greens joined with the local Black Radical Congress and Peace Action groups in issuing an anti-NATO, anti-war statement. Other Greens were demonstrating on the same theme in New York and Washington, DC while the NATO countries held their 50th anniversary meeting. On Saturday, many Greens attended the Millions for Mumia Marches in Philadelphia and San Francisco, while others participated in a caravan through New Jersey protesting the Mobile Chernobyl of radioactive waste shipments. On Sunday, Greens from New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania met in Philadelphia to discuss national Green Party organizing problems. On Monday, Greens in New York were lobbying the New York State Legislature on Earth Day Lobby Day. Throughout the country in these four days, Greens were active in local Earth Day events.
But are the Greens ready to handle such success? It is no secret among independent political activists that Greens have been squabbling on the national level since they began organizing in the U.S.. While local Green groups and many state parties have functioned well without debilitating power struggles, the same cannot be said for the Greens nationally. Today there are two national Green Party organizations, The Greens/Green Party USA (GPUSA) and the Association of State Green Parties (ASGP), reflecting a split that has been developing since the mid-1980s.
The split is not particularly about the programs and platforms. Both organizations and their affiliates support the same basic platforms: single-payer health care, jobs for all, guaranteed minimum income, reduction in work time, no nukes/renewable energy, progressive income and wealth taxes combined with eco-taxes to discourage pollution and depletion of resources, deep cuts in military spending, opposition to financial and trade deregulation, an end to the war on drugs and alternatives to incarceration for nonviolent offenders, citizen review boards to oversee police, rewriting corporate charters to restrict capital mobility and introduce forms of economic democracy, and so forth. While NATO's bombing campaign in Yugoslavia has created enormous controversy and contention inside European Green parties, both U.S. groups have come out clearly opposed to NATO's intervention. If there is any difference in politics, it is over the vision of a Green economy. Within the Greens, this vision ranges from an anti-corporate Jeffersonian vision of small property owners to various anti-capitalist visions of decentralized eco-socialism. This range of visions exist within both GPUSA and ASGP. The ASGP draft "Green Platform" does articulate more limited anti-corporate measures, while the GPUSA "Green Program" presents more expansive anti-capitalist proposals. But both groups welcome Jeffersonians and eco-socialists alike within what they conceive of as a broad anti-corporate front.
The split is not about independent politics versus fusion politics. Although the New Mexico Greens flirted briefly with fusion, it never had much support in any section of the Green Party movement. In New York, the only state where fusion is common practice and candidates normally try to get as many of the eight ballot lines as they can, sentiment is strong that the New York Greens must not become just another ballot line trading favors for endorsements of corporate politicians. The draft bylaw amendments to deal with the Green Party's new ballot status propose limiting the possibility of cross-endorsement with other ballot line parties to no more than 30% of any county's Green candidates.
Nor is the split about movement vs. party. Both groups are on record for building a party that is engaged in movement as well as electoral work.
Some of the state parties were already operating outside the GPUSA framework by 1996. In California and Oregon, for example, when state membership assemblies of the Green Committees of Correspondence decided it was premature to seek a ballot line, groups split off to register voters into the Green Party to create a Green ballot line. When California got its ballot line in 1992, its leaders began demanding more representation in GPUSA's Green Congress and National Committee than their GPUSA members in the state entitled them to on the grounds that they also had 80,000 party registrants. When it formed in November 1996, ASGP organized as a federation of state Green parties. While leaving it to the states to decide what constituted their state party membership, ASGP's leadership promoted a registration-based party model. However, several ASGP affiliates are structured around dues-paying members and 23 states don't even keep party enrollment lists.
The party structure issue came down to GPUSA's participatory democracy of party activists vs. ASGP's plebiscitory democracy of party registrants.2 Who gets voting rights in the Green Party: active dues-paying members or whoever enrolls in the party with the state? GPUSA argued that the dues-paying activist model was more consistent with the Green principle of grassroots democracy. A party of active members can build itself around its values, principles, and program, can elect its candidates and leadership by membership convention instead of state-run primaries, and thereby govern itself by a democratic process with grassroots participation and accountability. GPUSA argued that the registrant/primary party would, as it has with the Democrats and Republicans, lend itself to domination by entrepreneurial, personality-based candidacies run by elite cadres of campaign activists who have no direct, face-to-face interaction with the base of party registrants. Anybody can register in the party, regardless of her/his politics. Registrants' only role is to vote for candidate nominations and party committee leaders in primaries and caucuses, which are really just plebiscites where the candidates have been pre-selected by party elites, which means the politicians, their financial backers, and the campaign workers looking for spoils. This uniquely American party structure has historically bred self-seeking, personality-based politicians and undermined principled, programmatic parties. GPUSA also argued that its dues-paying activists model would insure financial democracy by making the party responsible to thousands of small supporters instead of a few fat cats.
ASGP advocates of the registrant party model scorned dues as a "poll tax" and argued that primaries and caucuses open to all party registrants were more democratic because they were more broadly based. ASGP formally expects its state party affiliates to contribute 1% of their state party budgets, but no state party has made this contribution so far.
This issue over party structure is one every third party faces when it begins to acquire ballot lines. When the Socialist Party of Oregon got a ballot line in 1996, it made demands on the Socialist Party USA similar to those the Green Party of California had made on the Green Party USA. The Socialist Party USA stuck with its active membership structure, so the Oregon party disaffiliated. (When they lost their ballot line in the 1998 election, they began merger discussions with the Pacific Green Party of Oregon, which is registrant-based.) In adopting its Resolution on Electoral Strategy in November 1998, the Labor Party answered this question by declaring it would nominate candidates by membership convention instead of primary, which means it will have to challenge many state election laws that mandate nominations by primary.3 The Libertarian Party has accommodated itself to state primary requirements, but still allocates votes to its national convention proportional states' dues paid membership. With 26,000 members, the Libertarian Party is able to sustain a fairly effective national organization. Nader told the Labor Party convention in November 1998, "If you were to ask me what it takes in the next two to four years to build a major party in America ... I would say the following: a million people contributing an average of $25 a year each and volunteering an average of 100 to 150 hours a year each, and you've got yourself a major political party."4 While the California and New Mexico parties have been militantly anti-dues, several other ASGP-affiliated state parties require dues of voting members.
In an effort to acknowledge the reality on the ground and create a unified national Green Party, "inclusive" structure proposals have been put to both ASGP and GPUSA to adopt a structure that gives state parties proportional representation in the national bodies according to some formula that factors in different measures of membership or support: dues-paying members, party registrants, and/or votes received. While these proposals have wide support among Greens generally, they have not been accepted by either group yet. ASGP has refused thus far to put such a proposal on its agenda or even to discuss structure and unification with GPUSA, which has sought discussions. While GPUSA has instructed committees to prepare inclusive structure proposals, to date they have only narrow majority support in Green Congresses, but not the two-thirds support needed to amend the bylaws. While these structure issues are important for what kind of party the Greens will become over the long run, most Greens would probably accept any reasonable compromise to get all Greens back under one tent.
Most Greens, whether affiliated with ASGP, GPUSA, both, or neither are sick of the infighting and could not care less about who said what to whom years ago. The questions of structure and unity will come up again at the ASGP and GPUSA national meetings this year in June and July respectively. ASGP claims 25 affiliated state parties and GPUSA claims 18 affiliated state parties, along with members and locals in most of the states. Eight state parties are affiliated with both GPUSA and ASGP. The New York party has called for a caucus of dually-affiliated states to take the lead in trying to pull the Greens back together.
Meanwhile, national Green organizing is largely uncoordinated. GPUSA tries to make decisions and carry them out with paid staff and travel subsidies for people doing national or international work, but its resources are so limited that volunteers still do most of the work. From a peak of 2100 paid members in 1991, GPUSA has dropped as low as 550 members partly because of the split, partly because the energy is focused at the state party level in many states, but mainly because dues renewal and solicitation notices have not been going out consistently.
GPUSA maintains a national information clearinghouse, holds an annual Green Congress and three National Committee meetings a year, and publishes a quarterly newspaper, Green Politics, and a quarterly magazine, Synthesis/Regeneration. But it does not have the resources to support field organizers, issue research, party literature, and other services a national party could provide. ASGP is running purely on volunteers and mainly through the internet, with one annual meeting of two delegates from each affiliated state party. A newspaper, Green Pages, comes out intermittently.
One consequence of this lack of national staff and resources is that people doing national and international work on behalf of GPUSA and ASGP do so largely out of their own pockets, which limits who gets to do it to who can afford to do it. The Green national organizations make decisions, but things tend to happen only when volunteers come forward to do it, which means many decisions are not carried through and sometimes self-appointed people step into the vacuum to make things happen that were never collectively decided.
This free-for-all national Green milieu means the Green presidential candidate(s) will have enormous influence on how the Green Party will look after the 2000 election. Any serious Green presidential campaign will qualify for federal primary matching funds and raise hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not a few million dollars. That means the presidential campaign organization(s) will dwarf the national staff and volunteers working on behalf of GPUSA and ASGP, as well as the state party organizations in most of the states. What the presidential candidate(s) do will probably matter more than what GPUSA or ASGP do in determining what the Green Party looks like nationally coming out of the 2000 election.
Neither GPUSA nor ASGP is going to roll over the other. Since both have the organizational capacity to run their own presidential campaigns with a candidate on at least 20 state ballots, they both have the capacity to spoil the other's candidacy. Although a few partisan voices on both sides have advocated separate candidacies and separate Green parties, the majority of Greens view that prospect as a recipe for marginalizing the Greens.
If the Greens are going to have a unified presidential campaign, at a minimum they need to agree on an inclusive national convention that is legitimate to the state affiliates of ASGP, GPUSA, both, and neither. That convention would need to nominate the presidential ticket, adopt the platform, and at least set in motion a process for coming up with a unified structure in order to take the next step: a unified filing with the FEC for the status of National Committee of the Green Party, which will then qualify the party for federal funding should its ticket receive more than 5% of the vote.
That unified structure could be a variant of the hybrid structure mentioned above. It could also be the traditional party structure of the Democrats and Republicans, where national committees and conventions represent state party delegations proportional to the general populations of the states rather than the party membership (however defined), perhaps with some superdelegates thrown in to insure that politicians and party leadership have extra weight in the process. Indeed, the national convention proposal from an ASGP committee to be considered in June is along these lines, although a counter proposal supporting a hybrid structure is expected. If the Greens use the conventional American party structure, the rivalry between GPUSA and the Green Politics Network that spawned the ASGP will probably continue in the form of rival political clubs contending for influence within the larger registration party framework set up by the 50 states' election laws and FEC regulations. The third possibility is that ASGP and GPUSA will put forward competing candidates, set up competing parties in the states and nationally, and render themselves marginal. Whether the Greens have the political maturity to set aside sectarian interests and put the larger interests of the movement foremost will determine whether the Greens are ready for the political success they are on the brink of achieving or whether they will squander the opportunity they have in 2000 to establish the Green Party as the independent left alternative on ballots all across the U.S.