The Green Party: an electoral force to be reckoned with?

• Author: Scipes, Kim

The Green Party seeks to become an electoral actor and ultimately a force within US electoral politics. How is it doing? The Greens are attracting good candidates, and they recognize the value of organization, something that much of the left today seems to have lost. These are important.

However, I am troubled by the limits of their organizational focus. Yes, there are some Green Party members and candidates who have a broader vision than just electoral victories, but this understanding doesn't seem to permeate the organization. Most of their organizational focus is on electoral efforts--and it appears to be pervasive.

One of the priorities is for the Green Party to develop leadership. Its efforts to date to accept candidates on the basis of their willingness to run as Greens in an election seems insufficient to develop the Party. It also increases the likelihood that key activists will be limited to those highly educated and/or better off financially.

The Party must develop leadership at the grassroots level, allow that leadership to develop in ways including electoral candidacy but not confined to that, and try to generate as many good leaders/organizers/popular educators/activists as possible. The party needs to develop a conscious process to move supporters--using a concentric ring model--from the outside, just voting Green but who are not involved beyond voting, to becoming members of the Green Party, and then into becoming activists for the Party; i.e., moving them closer to the center of the Party.

And key to the organizational development is an educational process for anyone wanting to get further involved. The Green Party, while entering electoral politics from an environmental perspective, cannot remain only an environmental party. And while theoretically it is not (see 10 Green values), in many ways it is--or at least is seen as such. While necessary, that is not sufficient: an educational program needs to be developed to educate all members of the Party along hopefully with "outsiders," to see how environmental issues are interconnected with many others. For example, as Americans become more knowledgeable about the entire issue of climate change ("global warming"), we need to also bring in the issue of "peak oil" and the forthcoming energy crisis. Thus the need for alternative energy sources, excluding nuclear. But we are a long way from producing an amount of alternative energy comparable--and as useable in many forms--to...