by Russell Cole

What ever happened to the Green Party?  Remember, the Green Party; the People’s Party; the Party with an egalitarian structure that practiced grass-roots politics and social democracy when deliberating over its own policies and affairs?

The Green Party of old no longer exists in any substantive form; only in a projection of text displayed as a representation of the Green Party’s internal organizational practices.  The Party has installed a hierarchical structure and has developed a culture of suspicion and ideological dogma that is tantamount to a cultural condition that exists under a totalitarian state such as fascism. 

The Green Party still attempts to project an image of itself which reinforces the prejudices developed from impressions of the organization as it first emerged as the premier third party movement in American politics.  However, the rhetoric consists of propositions that describe states-of-affairs that are absent of any reference to the external facts comprising the Party’s practices. 

I speak as a former insider, and I can state with absolute conviction that The Green Party is dominated by a clique of cronies who have successfully consolidated power within the party structure, and quite actively preserve their power through the silencing of dissent and the praxis of exclusionary politics.  They go so far as to banish members under contrived charges of impropriety in order to maintain the cohesion of an organization that is void of deliberative participatory democracy.  There is no democracy left in the Green Party.  There is perhaps a form of republicanism, but one can enjoy this mitigated, marginal form of political participation in the Democratic Party.  So, I ask:  What is the need for the Green Party, other than to act as the spoiler party to the Democrats?  The Green Party promises no democratic reform; no political decentralization that would empower the individuals emotionally attached to one another in local communities; therefore, The Green Party is an entity that is a hindrance to oppositional politics in America, and certainly not a guiding light in the struggle to democratize a society that has slipped into a state of Empire.  ‘Green’ is no longer a signifier of populist reform; it is a symptom of pathology.  The Green Party has been infected by the corrupting elements of petty minded people who aspire to the advancement of their own provincial interests at the expense of a movement that once promised to be the People’s emerging voice in American politics. 

I could list names, but to publicly embarrass people would contrary to the most pragmatic solution to the problem at hand.  At this point in time, attempting to salvage the Green Party is a waste of activist resources.  The Party is starting to implode, due to the tyrannical imposition of the will of a faction that believes it needs to take control of the organization in order to impose structure and coordination to the activities of the minions under its control.  California Greens are nearly in revolt.  They are by far the largest pocket of Greens in the nation, and their disassociation from the Party would render the Green US a mere vestige of what it once was.  The national organization would be politically impotent. 

Let the Green Party die of this infection, and let something new originate from the organic processes associated with grass-roots activism.  It is time for a new voice to be heard from the wilderness, and the most viable organization to assume this role is the Populist Party of America; a party that has yet to succumb to the dynamics of institutionalization, which leads to stasis, rendering the entity inert.  The Populist Party of America is poised to take hold of the reigns of the American third-party, oppositional culture, and the time is coming near to a transition that will be abrupt and definitive.  Those who still value direct, deliberative democracy; grass-roots politics; decentralization of governmental power; and social and economic reform; need to find a new home within Populist America, because it is now the lone voice crying out from the wilderness - the new dynamic of oppositional politics in American culture.

Tags: democracy, grassroots politics, green party, politics, populist, populist party, russell cole, third parties
Categories: Commentary, National, Democracy, liberty, Politics, Third Parties
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Like all dimensions of the identity politics associated with the New-left, the Green Party’s philosophical underpinnings consist of a bullet list of values. It is the purpose of this essay to demonstrate that such an approach to politics consists of merely creating paradoxical tangles of propositions that result in a philosophy that is practically void of any pragmatic qualities. The lack of any usefulness results from the inability of one to actually infer any deductions from the core principles contained in the philosophy, which might provide some direction as to the posture one should assume when facing issues of political and social significance. The Green Philosophy can be considered nothing more than pure sophism in the sense that it is rhetoric void of any substantive insights.

We do not want to bore the reader so we shall just proffer a single instance of the type of confusion to which we are referring. The following are both principles contained in the “Key-values” of the Green Party: One should possess personal responsibility to his or her social and ecological environment; as well as, one should, contemporaneously, have a respect for cultural diversity. We shall first provide a broader context in order for the reader to better understand the implications of these two positions.

Communitarianism, which we consider to be the general ideological framework from which the former of the two Key-values is derived, is a philosophy that stresses the positive obligations one has to his or her community along with the positive expectations that he or she is obliged to expect from his or her community. This value - derived from communitarianism - is at odds with the predominate American ideology, which stresses Liberalism in its classical form, which we consider to be the ideological perspective from which the latter of the two Values emanates.

This Anglo philosophy, classical Liberalism, emphasizes the negative rights and negative obligations of individuals within a community. We emphatically believe that classical Liberalism, or what we shall call libertarianism, is a crucial component of the Key-values of the Green Party, in the sense that it is the bedrock for Values such as the tolerance for diversity, which consists, mostly of negative obligations; namely, not to interfere with the practices of others.

For instance, for one to possess the value of tolerance for diversity, he or she must be prepared to abstain from condemning an individual who transgresses the conventions and norms of the community in question, and understand that this particular individual has a different understanding of what constitutes appropriate behavior.

The Value of Personal Responsibility, however, seems to run in contradistinction to the Value of Tolerance, because a member of a community should be expected to act in a manner that falls within the moral boundaries as they are defined by the community, due to the Value of Personal Responsibility. One, so to speak, is to be a good citizen, which curtails an individual’s negative rights not to be persecuted for practicing his or her own unique form of life.

So, the problem has been identified and this conflict between the Key-values of the Greens, if not corrected, debases the very validity of the Green Philosophy in its totality. The paradox can be summarized as follows: One is to be community oriented, because of his or her personal responsibilities, while, contemporaneously, he or she and others are to be tolerant of difference, which might run counter to the conventions and values of the local community.

How is one to balance these opposing dynamics, not just in theory, but in practice as well? We have not even begun to attempt to unravel this mess of contrary and competing positions, which provides no practical guidance as how to position oneself when politically engaged.

Russell Cole

Tags: community, decentralization, democracy, government, green party, liberty, philosophy, populist, populist party, responsibility, Russell Coles Blog, third parties
Categories: Commentary, Populist Party, Democracy, liberty, government, Russell Cole's Blog, Decentralization
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