Green and growing: 2004 in perspective.

• Position: Green Party

The 2004 elections find the sole superpower at the center of a spiraling global crisis, fed in part by the actions, and sometimes inaction, of the establishment political parties. In 2004 the Greens must present an active electoral opposition to the establishment parties and the interests they serve.

The Greens must develop a positive, forward-looking strategy that involves elections at the bottom, middle, and top of the political ladder. We must address the current crisis with our candidates and our campaigns. We must provide voters and non-voters alike with reason to believe that the Greens are here to stay, to grow, and ultimately, to transform American society for the better.

From alternative to opposition

The experience of the US Greens is typical of a textbook shift in the rise of political parties. This is the shift from alternative to opposition politics. While the Greens of the 1980s were intent on building a cultural and political alternative to the dominant political establishment, now the Greens are becoming a movement capable of offering not only alternatives, but also active opposition, to the establishment.

To say that such a shift is "textbook" is not to say that it is common. In fact, relatively few national political parties in the history of the United States have made such a transition. Today, the Green Party is entering a period of political opposition in which our role is to confront and oppose the deadly policies enacted by the establishment parties, as well as to oppose the establishment parties themselves.

Towards transformation

The long view of a political party's growth sees not only a textbook transition from the posing of a political "alternative" to the confrontation of the establishment with active political "opposition." This view sees also, finally, a shift from "opposition" to "transformation." Because the Greens take our purpose seriously, we cannot be satisfied with posing alternatives, or with the offering of opposition. We must be working toward the democratic transformation of US politics, culture, economics, ecology, and international relations. The Greens will remain the anti-party party, refusing co-optation of all kinds, and yet the Greens must also commit to the end of actually succeeding in our work.

Government power

In a growing number of communities, Greens in elective office, together with local Green parties, now have the ability to use the power of local government to enact the policy proposals long offered only as alternatives. In these Green localities, our movement is already at the cusp of the transition from opposition to transformation.

Elected Greens have taken a lead in implementing expanded living wage and tenant rights ordinances, in democratizing municipal government, instituting Instant Runoff Voting, and in establishing public ownership of utilities. Greens holding office have also learned how to use local governments as instruments of resistance to authoritarian policies enacted by the federal government (for example, the PATRIOT Act, corporate personhood, biotechnology, military recruiters, etc.).

Recent progressive movements in the US possess limited experience with the effective use of government power as an instrument of democracy. As Greens win more elections at the local, state, and eventually national levels, we will need to learn how to make the most of our electoral successes. We will need to learn how to use local government power as an instrument for building the democracy movement.

Resistance

As an electoral force, the Greens have the ability to provide the larger democracy movement with the use of a "no" vote at the ballot box. That such votes would be characterized as protest votes is unsurprising, for they are. The three million votes cast for Nader and LaDuke in 2000 represented a significant act of "ballot-box solidarity" against the economic policies of Bush-Gore...