In a lot of ways, so do I. But for some reason, after the 2002 midterms bloodbath, I snapped. Instead of hating them, I got involved. I called the state party, talked to the locals and figured out what to do. Two years and a heartbreaking loss later, I still think this is the right course of action.
I'm writing this now because I've been thinking about it for a long time, and we're having a Greens & Democrats forum here locally on Monday. I'm on the hot seat to defend this choice so I wanted to get my thoughts in order. But I also hope this can feed into the ongoing dialogue about what being a Reform Democrat means, not to mention serve as a cheat sheet if you've been having the same conversations.
WHY PARTIES?
The first question I think is this: why do we need parties at all? Why should we even bother? This is a big, historic and interesting question, and a solid answer is far beyond the scope of what I'm after here. An exasperated Thomas Jefferson said that, "If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all," but further study of his thoughts on the subject shows that he believed they were essential inevitable. I'm sure people smarter than me here can elaborate further on this question, but in the meantime here's a few thoughts...
Isolation is silence. The trend towards being proudly "independent" or nonpartisan is among the most destructive recent developments in our democracy. If you're an "independent," you've been effectively silenced. You are alone, powerless. It's a basic rule of democracy: numbers matter. If you're concerned about where we're headed politically in this country, voting is only the most basic level of involvement, you have got to do more than just vote - you have to band together with other like minded folks and shape things. At the most basic level, that's the dynamic that drives party creation and it's not necessarily a bad thing. So if you're not part of one of the major parties and shaping the direction it's headed, you're not making as optimal of a difference as you could be.
527s and PACs ain't democracy. The party is. The bylaws and rules for the national Democratic Party runs to 26 pages. For the California Democratic Party, it's 42. Tack on another 8 for our county committee bylaws. Those pages contain the DNA of a deeply democratic institution, they're the code that gives rise to what is nominally a massively scaleable, geographically distributed engine for holding society together and creating change. PACs and 527s are highly centralized and beholden to small numbers of donors and leaders. Structurally, they are very different kinds of organizations.
You know that Margaret Mead quote, the one about a small group of people changing the world, because that's the only thing that ever has? Forget about that. Our system of democracy is designed to make that sort of thing nearly impossible, and when it does happen it's almost always a bad thing (the neocon cabal currently running things is a perfectly unfortunate example). This moment in history is all about getting LARGE numbers of people to wake up.
I'm not arguing that anyone should give up on their involvement in progressive and non-party groups. Those groups are super important! We just all need to add the party to the mix now. We need to make sure that our issues and the energy those groups generate is inexorably fused to the political and electoral process - that's how we'll build long-term infrastructure for change.
We need big, structural change. Helping individual people is important. Art is important. Building new technologies and creating jobs is important. But the United States is (for the moment at least) the richest and mightiest country on the planet and we are NOT handling that power responsibly at this point. The only way to get into the really big issues, the systematic ones, is through the political process.
Protests aren't cutting the mustard. Protests, whether they happen at the ballot box by voting for third parties or in the streets, might seem like another way to effect change from outside the system. If you're satisfied with the results that the anti-war protests have achieved, ignore this: protests are really just one kind of political tactic, and the space of possible tactics is practically infinite. Tactics without strategy is a recipe for wheel-spinning. Fusing progressive energy with the Democratic party is a strategy. Continued protests, whether it's at the ballot box or in the streets, is just a series of tactics.
WHY THE DEMOCRATS?
If you can at least for the time being accept parties at least as an invetiability, the next question is why the Democrats instead of some other party. Since I used to be a Green, that's mostly what I'm thinking of here, but these apply equally to the third party of your choice.
First, Duverger's Law. This sociological law states "the simple-majority single-ballot system favours the two-party system." That's the system we use, ergo we've got two big parties that win almost all the elections and a bunch of little ones that almost never do. Google this if you want more information, I'm not going to go into the details, but it's interesting stuff.
So maybe you think our electoral system sucks rocks and needs to be changed. I tend to agree - who wasn't smitten when Howard Dean talked about Instant Runoff Voting early in the campaign? Or maybe we could go with a New York state style fusion, or even go all the way for straight out proportional representation, which to my mind would suit the American mindset of "I want it exactly my way" the best. Whatever we eventually pick, the only way to effect that kind of change that is to elect reform-minded people and build a reform-minded party. And the only feasible way to do that is by working through the current system.
Winning rules. Here in Santa Barbara, on November 2nd we sent our second bona fide progressive environmentalist in a row to Sacramento to represent us in the State Assembly. Kerry's loss hurt, but this win certainly took some of the edge off it. As cool as he is, for a million reasons I don't think he ever would've made it if he'd run as a third party candidate.
Winning is just plain a whole lot more fun than losing. I guess if you're a Green you can lose and just complain about the system being broken. But wouldn't you rather win and be able to start fixing the problems? When it comes down to it, campaigns are just a sideshow to the real game, which is governing. But if you don't win, you never even get to put a piece on that board.
Ideology vs. strategy. A funny thing didn't happen when I switched from being a Green to being a Democrat in 2001: none of my positions changed. I still think the environment has to be our #1 priority. I still think the 10 key values of the Greens are swell. I may be a little more pragmatic on some issues that I was a few years ago (probably an inevitable process consequence of getting older and thinking about stuff more), but I wasn't a centrist then and I'm sure not one now. Ideology isn't strategy: all that's changed is how I go about implementing the changes I'd like to see.
Ideological purity sucks. Get dirty. It's astonishing to think that one of the biggest prudes in the history of humanity, James Dobson (the Focus on the Family guy), and pot smoking, womanizing, icon of mass consumption Arnold Schwarzenegger are in the same party, isn't it? That's a pretty big tent they've got going over there!
We really need to do the same. From Joe Lieberman to Noam Chomsky, we share the same bedrock values, so let's all get along. If you think you're "too left" for the Democrats, your job is to drag them over to where you're at and get them to stand up and fight, not to sniff your nose and go on and on about how ideologically pure you are for not getting involved with those unclean moderate Dems.
Real diversity is way cool. I didn't get too involved with the Greens on the local level so I may be wrong here - maybe there's a caucus of highly racially and economically diverse Greens somewhere that I simply haven't run into. But it seems like every Green I run into is a lot like me: white and middle to upper-middle class. Borrring. Our local Democratic central committee isn't perfectly diverse, but we have folks from all backgrounds and walks of life, we have military people, union people, enviros, we have a couple different races represented. I know outreach is tough to do, but the fact is that the Greens simply don't seem to be appealing to a broad demographic. The Democrats are, and when we're not infighting over turf battles or ideology like a bunch of kindergartners, it's one of the strongest aspects of the party.
Social justice matters a lot, too. The environment is my number one issue. Pretty much always has been, for the pretty simple reason that I think practically everyone outside of an oil industry funded think tank gets: screwing with the environment just ain't worth it. Maybe we'll run out of oil and civilization will collapse and maybe it won't, but why are we taking these kinds of risks exactly?
But as important as the environment is, it's not my only issue. In fact, because I feel like I do think like an environmentalist, I can't easily separate my thirst for social justice from my hunger for protecting the planet. I strongly believe not only that we can harness the energy of capitalism to solving environmental problems as well as distributing the fruits of this system more fairly, but that these two tasks are deeply interconnected.
This is one of the things that Ralph "gonadal politics" Nader just didn't get. I feel like he didn't see the connections, the broad agenda. There's a whole set of issues that I feel like are a consequence of the emerging progressive worldview, and fighting for one little piece of it isn't any more likely to succeed than protecting the azalea bush on your front lawn will create the systematic change really needed for our species to continue to survive and prosper.
Horrifyingly bad things can happen when the left is divided. Yes, I'm playing the Hitler card here. Sue me. But seriously: if the first movie in the Holocaust Museum exhibit in DC is to be believed, a divided and ineffective left played a role in the early phases of Hitler's rise to power in the late 1920s and early 30s. Now, I'm hardly a student of history, but even I know that Bush is no Hitler. I think it's a stretch to even say we're headed vaguely that direction at this point. But, with a couple more poorly timed terrorist attacks, who knows what could happen or who might succeed him. That's not a scenario I'm particularly curious to see play out.
Brands are expensive. A more practical reason. Over the next few years, I believe hundreds of millions of dollars are going to pour into left-wing organizations, which will give us the media and messaging power to start to counter the vast right-wing conspiracy. This is exciting stuff, and I think building what we need to build is going to be a lot of fun. But we still have to be sure we use that money wisely. In this age of almost limitless corporate noise, building the brand for a new or existing small third party from the ground up is going to cost serious money. The Democrat message may be clear as mud right now, but it's still going to be far more cost effective to rebuild around that brand than to cook another one up from scratch.
It's how they did it. Last, there's a blindingly obvious and recent historical example: this inside/outside strategy is precisely how the Republicans have achieved their control over all three branches of government over the past forty years. They didn't waste their energy by splitting off a third party, at least not in any signficant numbers. They worked through outside organizations like their churches but they always were sure to weld that energy straight into the electoral process, and the Republican Party was the mechanism they used to accomplish this. The Democratic Party is our only ticket.
If you haven't already, now's the time to get started: creating change, even at the local level, takes a couple of election cycles. Start dumping energy now into whatever form your local party takes, then look at the next level up and think about launching a campaign to reform that. We could build an institutional base of Democrats that are always on: people that are always doing outreach and always thinking about ways the party can do stuff better.
You are not "too left" for the Democrats. The Democrats need you. Let's get this party started.
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