Post-Election Organizing: Winning Over Grassroots Progressives.

• Author: Hawkins, Howie

The Nader 2000 campaign precipitated the sharpest split between liberals and radicals since the mid 1960s when radicals in the civil rights and anti-war movements broke with the Democratic Party over its racism and Vietnam. The liberals today work as junior partners in a left-center coalition with more powerful corporate interests inside the Democratic Party, claiming it is the only way to hold off the more conservative Republican right. The radicals want class independence from the whole corporate power structure through a independent progressive political party, arguing that the way to turn the country in a progressive direction is to organize directly around a progressive program, not around the lesser-evil version of the corporate agenda.

The majority base of the Democratic Party remains the majority of the working class, especially African Americans and other people of color, plus the issue-oriented progressives in the women's, gay, peace, and environmental movements. Polling during the 2000 election campaign showed that 10 million of these people preferred Ralph Nader as their first choice and an additional 10 million seriously considered voting for Nader.

Yet 80-90% of these progressives voted for the lesser evil, Al Gore. The liberal leadership elites made attacking Ralph Nader as a spoiler their top priority during the summer and fall, with groups like the National Organization for Women, National Abortion Rights Action League, Human Rights Campaign, and Sierra Club spending more than $6 million on anti-Nader ads in the last few weeks, far more than the Nader campaign spent on its own ads for the whole campaign. The anti-Nader blitz by the liberal lobbying groups was very effective in discouraging potential Nader votes.

Over the next four years, we can expect the liberal lobbying professionals to intensify their attacks on the Greens. They will be calling for a united front inside the Democratic Party against the Republican right. In the 2002 congressional election and the 2004 presidential election, they will present the Democrats as the only realistic alternative to everything we oppose about the Congressional Republicans and the Bush administration.

An important question now for the Greens, therefore, is how do we convince the popular progressive base of the Democratic Party that the Greens are a better vehicle for progressive change than the Democrats?

Realignment vs. Independent Politics

The Greens are not the first movement for independent political action to grapple with this question. The Democratic Party has captured every progressive movement since the populists committed political suicide by supporting the Democratic Presidential nominee, William Jennings Bryan, in 1896. After a period in which Socialist...