Pro: Today, I took concrete action to help make the world a better place by scheduling a Green Party caucus for members who wanted to talk about local policy issues and taking action to make things better…
Con: I also took action yesterday, and the day before, and the day before, spreading the word and sending letters and making phone calls…
Pro: Those of us who attended had a productive discussion about community issues, state elections and political action…
Con: There were five of us who attended. Two were campaign organizers come to pull us into greater levels of commitment to the Party…
Pro: The people I met were really nice and thoughtful…
Con: In order to succeed locally by matching the activity of corporate-funded parties, three times number of the nice and thoughtful people I met tonight will need to exhaust themselves in a constant rush…
Pro: The effort would be easy if just 10% of the people who care showed up to a meeting…
Con: The effort would be easy if just 10% of the people who care showed up to a meeting.
Well we can have libertarian or Constitution party oriented candidates run within the republican primary. That way if they win, they get control of the party machinery.
Why not just do this?
You can. But I haven’t yet met a “libertarian or Constitution party oriented candidate” running within the Republican party that doesn’t make my nose curl.
Well I was using it as an analogy.
Why don’t these green party people just run in the dem primary?
OK, I get it. That’s a good question.
For some people, I think the answer is principled: they don’t want to participate in a party that is more dedicated to winning than it is to consistent application of principles.
For other people, the answer is more practical: it’s not a matter of “just” running in the Democratic primary. Rules vary, but typically in order to get the support of local Democratic committees, you’ve got to do an incredible amount of grunt work for other Democratic candidates first — candidates who typically have the support of the local entrenched interests that are connected to that Democratic committee and might not therefore be the most progressive candidates. Then, if you’re not going to be a candidate who supports the local entrenched interests, the Democratic committee will find someone else to throw its weight (and fundraising connection$) behind, someone who is more compliant. The very effective but very frustrating strategy of local Democratic (and Republican) party committees is to monopolize lists and networks of a bloc of active citizens, and therefore to control to a large extent whether a candidate will have fundraising success for a campaign. Breaking into and taking over this machinery will be hard because local party chiefs hoard their information and control… and what’s more, if you succeed in taking over the machinery you can become a slave to the machinery, because that machinery runs on the dollars of local entrenched interests.
For all the frustrations I had with getting a Green Party caucus together, they were nothing compared with the Democratic Party bureaucracies. Green Parties around the country tend to erect much smaller barriers to entry into a campaign, for better or for worse. In the Green Party you can easily be, as Maine Green candidate for Governor Lynne Williams is, a real rooting-tooting grassroots activist and run for major office.
None of the local officials in Kentucky are supporting Rand Paul. He has to rely on a national fundraising base.
Exactly — if his dad weren’t Ron Paul and he wasn’t able to tap into that source of external funding, he would have been finished in that Republican Party contest even before he’d gotten started… and you’re right, the Kentucky GOP is pulling out all the stops to get its own anointed and bought-off candidate the nomination instead.
You’re wasting your time thinking any political solution is going to change the inverted totalitarian system the corporatists have engineered over the past decades.
https://www.adbusters.org/magazine/88/chris-hedges.html
Which starts out with “All resistance must recognize that the body politic and global capitalism are dead.”
First of all, I won’t join any resistance movement that begins by insisting that “all resistance must recognize” anything. A resistance that’s so ideologically certain of itself isn’t going to allow for much freedom if it ever succeeds.
Secondly, global capitalism is not dead, and neither is the body politic. Maybe they have sprained ankles.