• an open letter to Michael Albert

By David Baldwin

Below is a response from a Green Party activist to an article by author and activist Michael Albert, entitled “Seriously? Stein? Sawant? Suicide?,” which recently appeared on Portside’s website. Mr. Albert’s piece is one of the most comprehensive arguments from a noted left-wing figure for rejecting Dr. Jill Stein’s Green Party candidacy for President in the current election.

Mr. Albert:

I'm responding to the article you published on Z, later reprinted on Portside, about Dr. Jill Stein, the Green Party's candidate for president. The article essentially calls into question the morality of her campaign, or at least of its strategy. In recent months, of course, many articles in a number of print and online venues have attacked Stein, mostly ineptly though nonetheless viciously. I've chosen to respond to yours for the following reasons:

• To your credit, you didn’t make either of the corny “Russian puppet” or “Trump asset” arguments: that is, you didn't claim, in McCarthyite fashion, that Stein is some kind of paid agent of Vladimir Putin – a charge which was, by the way, debunked by a thorough congressional investigation that cleared Stein of any wrongdoing. Nor did you claim she's some sort of secret supporter, paid or unpaid, of former president Trump.
• Your article was written from the point-of-view of someone sympathetic to the politics of Stein and her supporters and very unsympathetic to the politics of the Democratic establishment: that is, from an antiwar, anti-imperialist and pro-worker perspective. In short, you were mostly critical of Stein’s strategy and tactics rather than of her ideology and policy proposals.

Because of the two reasons cited above, there’s thus no need for me to waste time in justifying to you or to your readers Stein’s progressive positions and beliefs, nor in responding to bad faith charges of treason or complicity with the GOP, for which there’s zero evidence in any case.

So, Michael, I'll begin by asking you a hypothetical question. If eighteen months ago, well before October 7th, I had asked you if you'd ever consider supporting even tacitly, much less voting for, a U.S. administration that had not only aided and abetted, but consciously partnered with a U.S. ally to commit a genocide, would you ever have said “yes” or even “maybe”? If I know the first thing about you, you would surely have replied “Of course not” – and would have rightly felt insulted and bewildered to even be asked such a question. True progressives are always strongly antiwar, and genocide has justly been called, even by the Israelis themselves, "the crime of crimes."

Yet here we are. And here you are, pretending that such a thing as a vote with an asterisk attached to it exists: “I’m voting for you, Ms. Harris, because I feel I have no choice* (*but please note: I hate your war).” Strange as it may seem, I've yet to encounter a ballot with a comments section. In the end, one's vote is a binary statement – yes or no – and a vote for an incumbent candidate signifies, whether the voter thinks it does or not, or likes it or not, proof of consent for both that candidate’s actions and inaction. And that’s surely the message Harris will take away from the votes she’s bound to receive from other self-defeating progressives like you, which of course means she'll feel no pressure at all from them to change course.

Genocide is the Green Party’s “red line,” Mr. Albert. We’re sorry that it’s not yours.

Believe it or not, I was a Democrat once. And though I myself can scarcely believe it, I was a party member for 28 years, several years longer, in fact, than I've been a Green activist in the 21st Century. What was the turning point for me: the moment that led me to abandon the party of FDR – a decision I've never for one minute regretted? There was no single milestone, but if I had to choose the most important moment, it was when I read a short article in The New York Times Book Review one Sunday morning in the late 1990s.

The author of the piece in question was most unusual. He was a Republican judge reviewing a book by Bill Clinton, and he had many kind things to say about the Democratic president, for whom I’d voted twice. This intrigued me, because most people in the GOP at that time saw, or wanted others to see, the Man from Hope as some kind of cross between a demon and a satyr. But this judge regarded Clinton very favorably because, in his view, the president had preserved and extended the right-wing “revolution” that his Republican predecessors, Ronald Reagan and the first George Bush, had begun. To my horror, I realized that this man was right. And since I had supported Clinton precisely to undo that political lurch to the Right, this insight filled me with dismay.

Since then, I've noted that recent Democratic presidents have carefully preserved (if not built upon) the legacies of their GOP predecessors, no matter how reactionary. Clinton signed Newt Gingrich’s bill to decimate this country’s already thin set of social protections, which Clinton boasted would “end welfare as we have come to know it.” The next Democratic Party president, Barack Obama, continued George W. Bush's war on Iraq and expanded the killer drone program Bush started. And not only did Obama fail to prosecute Bush and Dick Cheney for illegally spying on Americans, as he was obligated to do as president, he codified their crimes into law, dramatically enhancing the terrifying power and reach of the surveillance state. Joe Biden, despite his campaign promises, never reversed Trump's withdrawal from the Iran peace deal (the only policy of Obama’s I ever publicly defended). Nor did he reverse Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital or his legitimization of its annexation of the Golan Heights. And for years, Biden carried on Trump's gruesome persecution of Julian Assange for the crime of good journalism, until it no longer made political sense to keep doing so.

Years ago, during a Green Party event in Texas, I heard a talk by a young woman in which she recalled her decision several years earlier to find a political party to join and was trying to choose which one. She called up a friend who was active with the local Democrats and asked him the same question she asked everyone she approached: “What are your party's core values?” But this time there was a very long, awkward pause on the other end of the line, which was only broken when the young man said, “Let me get back to you on that one,” and hung up. Needless to say, she never heard from him again.

But of course, Michael, you already know that the Democrats have no core values, except (sometimes) the “value” of winning at any cost. The ugly truth is that that party, like the GOP, is a cynical, exploitative, transactional rich person's club. The dirty deal the Democratic Establishment makes with its base is: “Vote for us to put us in power so we can do what we want, or rather what rich people want... and if you're good (read: “docile,” “complacent”), we might just throw a few crumbs your way.”

Thus, the Democrats' true relationship with the Republican Party, its competitor for the mega-dollars of the one percent, is not, despite appearances, adversarial or even oppositional, but co-dependent. The Dems need a crazy, extreme, right-wing party to get away with what it does, as well as what it fails to do, like keeping its decades-long campaign promise to legally codify Roe v. Wade. Actually, they must be mighty glad they never did that, because without the abortion issue during this election cycle, they’d literally have nothing but “Trump Is Bad” to run on.

There's a mad irony in the Democrats' shaming of progressive third parties like the Greens as alleged Republican stooges, at a time when Kamala Harris is proud to cozy up to the architect of the “War on Terror,” Dick Cheney, and his daughter, the anti-choice fanatic Liz Cheney, simply because they’re “anti-Trump.” Ralph Nader, the Green Party’s former candidate, is still a pariah to many Dems, while the men he’s falsely accused of having helped elect – Bush Jr. and Cheney – have been thoroughly rehabilitated by the Establishment. (Nader rightly mocks the phrase “this is not the time” commonly used to discourage third-party runs; for Establishment Democrats, it’s never the time.)

All this is to explain why I don't believe you when you argue that the Dems are our only defense, now or at any time, against Republican criminality. They simply can’t be trusted. It's not even a question of the greater or the lesser evil: that's not the issue. It's that both parties are toxic and unsustainable, because both are creating, rapidly or a bit more gradually, the conditions – political, economic, ecological – that will make rational, democratic governance in this country impossible. I suppose strychnine is “better” than arsenic, but I'd rather ingest neither.

“Resistance” liberals made uneasy by the Gaza massacre are so obsessed with Trump that, despite all the evidence, including Harris’ own words, they delusionally view her as some kind of peacenik. For them, rejecting her and her corrupt, mendacious party and starting from scratch would be just too damn scary and chancy. But actually, it's not necessary to build from zero. The Green Party already has a platform, and at least 80 to 90 percent of that document advocates policy positions that most Americans, as demonstrated in poll after poll, are in basic agreement with, and progressives like you are in very strong agreement with. The Greens have decades of experience gaining ballot access and running candidates with virtually no money. And, contrary to Democratic Party propaganda, we've been very successful at getting our candidates elected at the town and village levels, and occasionally at the municipal level as well – a minor miracle in view of the almost pathological opposition we’ve faced from those great lovers of democracy in the “liberal” mainstream party, who are spending millions trying to keep us off the ballot.

Most importantly, the Greens have never sold out our values or our principles. Which is why grieving and furious Muslim- and Arab-Americans are flocking to support, with their money, time, endorsements and votes, our anti-Zionist candidate, Jill Stein. And the fact that many of these are in swing states like Michigan is only a problem for Democrats because Biden and Harris, over the past year, have taken their wealthy Zionist donors, both Jewish and non-Jewish, and of course AIPAC, much more seriously than these angry Midwestern voters, and have thus never even considered insisting that Netanyahu accept a ceasefire.

You suggest, indeed demand, that Stein tell her supporters in swing states to vote for Harris. How humiliating it would be for a young woman who had just lost two dozen relatives in the Gaza genocide – a hypothetical example, but hardly a rare occurrence – to be told by a third-party peace candidate that, because of where she lived, she must vote for the Democratic candidate who had signed off on and armed the genocide! That, perhaps more than any other reason, is why Stein should, indeed must, campaign for herself in swing states: to prove to these forgotten people that somebody in American politics gives a damn about them.

You, like many others, assume that Jill Stein can't possibly win this election, so let’s, for argument's sake, concede that point. But Stein could, very conceivably, win the five percent of the national vote necessary to get federal funds, which would put the party in a position to compete more successfully four and eight years down the road, so as to finally bring progressive values and policy proposals into the national discourse and from there into the mainstream. Strange that you should neglect to mention in your piece, Michael, that very achievable third-party goal. Also, if she achieves a surprisingly high vote share, even if it comes nowhere near those of the duopoly parties, it would demonstrate to the public and to the political class that there is a significant body of opposition to the Gaza genocide.

At this point, I’m sure you’ll repeat the argument you made in your article, which is that third-party voters are naive, perhaps fatally so, and certainly fail to think strategically. (Is it only in America that voting your ideals is considered a destructive, even criminally irresponsible act?) I’d like to counter that argument with my view of a common strategy by progressive Democrats that I know to be a hopelessly naïve one: trying to reform the Democratic Party from within.

Many of our readers, and yours, would surely not be old enough to recall Allard Lowenstein. In the ‘Sixties during the Vietnam War, Lowenstein was the architect of the “Dump Johnson” movement, and sought, among other laudable goals, to have the Democrats adopt a more humane foreign policy, and to that purpose he ran for office himself several times, winning once. In the decades since, thousands of idealistic young Democrats, full of energy and passion, have also tried to “push the party to the Left.” But not only have these efforts failed utterly, but the Democratic Establishment has never been as conservative, relative to the culture, as it is today. The abject defeat of Senator Sanders and the Squad is just the latest debacle in this long, sad saga. The only hope for true change must come from outside the party, including from third parties such as the Greens.

I suppose what bothers me most about you and others who take the "yes, the Dems are awful, but on the other hand Trump..." position is that you people never specify what you think we should do on the “day after.” What if things turn out exactly the way you want them to, and Harris wins and Trump again fails to steal the election? Even if Trump goes away, we all know Trumpism itself will not, and the GOP certainly won’t. So, in that eventuality, would you call for, and work to organize (for example), a nationwide general strike of all non-essential services during Inauguration Week, which would force President Harris to demand a Gaza ceasefire simply so she could govern? Of course not, because such a bold project would then be accused of “playing into the hands of the far right,” and might even be publicly condemned as “another January 6th.” And we simply can't afford to take that risk, or in fact any other... now can we?

Finally, I'd like to ask a simple question: do you think it utterly inconceivable that a Harris administration might blunder into a full-scale nuclear war? I fear it's quite possible. Recently, President Biden sent an advanced anti-missile system as well as about 100 troops to Israel to provide its military with technical assistance for a possible attack on Iran, despite having no constitutional authority to do so – because no congressional authorization – thus involving the nation in a violent conflict with a country with which we are not at war. (Of course, the mainstream media, and for that matter Congress, don’t care about an insignificant detail like what the Constitution says.)

To people of our generation, of course, this action eerily echoes the sending of troops as “advisors” to Vietnam, several years prior to President Johnson's decision to fully escalate the undeclared war against that country. And when some of those hundred soldiers are killed by Iran, as they almost certainly will be, will the administration resist the powerful political pressure to escalate further? And with tensions between the U.S., Russia and China at an all-time high, will cooler heads prevail to draw us back from the brink, or will the momentum of events overwhelm everyone, until a nightmare from which the world will literally never awaken becomes our tragic reality?

So ultimately, Michael, it's all a question of responsibility. From the dawn of history, the ideal situation of virtually every state – monarchy, dictatorship or republic – has been to exercise power with 100 percent freedom and zero accountability. So it makes perfect sense that the Democrats should try to shift responsibility for their evil actions to the almost powerless Jill Stein and her supporters, though a single phone call from Biden to Netanyahu could win Michigan and other swing states for the Dems, guaranteeing an election victory. What is sad and bewildering is that you are aiding and abetting that party's criminal irresponsibility by accepting the rules by which the corrupt power game is played, whereby the strong escape all consequences and the innocent must bear the shame and the blame. We Greens do not accept those rules, and never will.

David Baldwin is a writer and activist for the Green Party and other progressive organizations. He lives in New York City.

Photo credit: Al Mezan Center for Human Rights