By Steven Johnson
Jill Stein said, while being interviewed by Mehdi Hasan:
“Mehdi, we are not going to build an alternative overnight. We’re going to have to build it. That’s right. And that may mean getting to 5%, then 10%, and then 15%.”
It’s the tired old third partyist dogma that you have to lose, lose, lose, and lose, letting the worst viable candidate on the ballot win, time after time, until you have built enough “momentum” to win.
First of all, Stein should be embarrassed to even be bringing this up, because she’s never built up anything like such momentum. She and the Green Party have been at this for decades, with precious little to show for it. They have not achieved anything like going from 5% to 10% to 15%. If memory serves, they have oscillated between percentages like 1% and 4%. And now, according to polls, they’re back down to 2%. If they hold on to this level of success, then perhaps they might win in a few centuries. Except humans might be extinct by then, because we did not pursue a truly workable political strategy to prevent that from happening.
Second, running candidates before they can win is NOT a necessary or even an effective way to build momentum. What has actually WORKED in history, in the US where there is no proportional representation[1], is to grow a massive base through non-electorally-centered movement building, and THEN run candidates in elections, once the movement is large enough to win elections, as I have argued in this article.
Third, Stein acts like this scenario of a third party growing incrementally, losing (and spoiling) several times before winning, is some kind of self-evident principle of how US politics works, of how it’s done. But has this ever actually happened? The Republican Party, when it first started, lost only ONE presidential election, in 1856, before winning in 1860. And even in that first presidential election, they came in second. They were never a spoiler.
But one thing that HAS happened in history is that movements have TAKEN OVER major parties, and radically changed their political content, and thereby succeeded in getting many of their policy agendas implemented. And that is as effective, in achieving actual policy outcomes, as a party with a new name beating out one of the two major parties.
The “Democrats” went from being the party of slaveowners to the (unreliable and inconsistent) party of Civil Rights. The “Republicans” went from being the party against slavery to a party into which Southern Democratic segregationists fled en masse once the Democrats became too “liberal”.
The Reagan Revolution and the later the “Tea Party” movement purged the Republican Party of its moderates, replacing them with extreme conservatives. And later the Trumpists ousted many of these conservatives, replacing them with Trumpists, as the remaining conservatives jumped onto the Trumpist bandwagon to save their political careers. With each of these waves, their goal was not to enter Congress to “work with” the remaining moderates that they were seeking to replace (though they did work with them for as long as and to the extent that they had to, before they got entirely rid of them). Their goal was to DEFEAT and REMOVE them.
Meanwhile, over the same period as this conservative takeover of the Republican Party, an obscure third party pursued a different strategy, the third party strategy, to promote essentially the same extreme conservative political agenda. They went under various names like the American Party and the Constitution Party. Like those who eventually took over the Republican Party, they were militantly opposed to moderates like Bob Dole who dominated the Republican Party for many years. But, instead of running insurgent challenges against these moderates in the Republican primaries, they opted to run candidates in their own third party. And they would NEVER vote for a moderate like Dole, as the lesser evil against a (supposed) liberal like Bill Clinton, in a general election. And if their numbers had not been so minuscule, they might have actually been a spoiler for Bill Clinton. They used the exact same rhetoric against “lesser evil” voting as the Greens and others.
And, like the Greens, they NEVER GOT ANYWHERE! While candidates with pretty much the same political agendas who opted to run insurgency campaigns against Republican incumbents in the Republican primaries, WON! And now there is no such thing as a moderate Republican. While most voters don’t even know that the American/Constitution Party ever existed.
That party’s mistake is the same as that of the Greens and others. They speak of the “Republican” and “Democratic” parties as if these are entities that have some kind of relatively fixed political essence. But the truth is that these major “parties” are simply a name and a placeholder for whatever political agendas are held at any given time by the majority of candidates and supporters who show up, with the result that their political content has been very fluid over the years. Their nature as a “container” or “placeholder” is to an extent a function of the state laws that structure the electoral system.
And so what is most important is not running under a separate ballot line from the two major parties, but building grassroots movements, beginning through activities outside of electoral campaigns, to a size that can defeat the incumbents of one of the these “placeholders” and fill that placeholder with radically different political content, just as the extreme conservatives, and later the Trumpists, actually DID in the Republican Party.
But how did the extreme conservatives build up their movement to such a size that they could elect Reagan and purge the old guard of moderates? And here I will repeat what I related at a little greater length in my article here. There were various ideological and social streams that joined to form this river. But one of the most important of these was the fundamentalist/evangelical Christians, who went from being a numerically small, politically inconsequential, and even stridently apolitical social phenomenon that only wanted to “save souls”, to being large and politicized enough to elect Reagan in 1980, after experiencing explosive exponential growth over about a decade through wholly apolitical programs of “evangelism” and “discipleship”.
In these programs, they proactively reached out to people, invited them into attractive alternative social spaces, forged and deepened social bonds, addressed needs in every area of life, and systematically trained as many church members as they could to boldly reach out to others.
Sounds a lot like what WE should be doing, does it not? Except we should do it to promote positive and constructive agendas, rather than ones that are pro-capitalist, inequality-justifying, homophobic, hellfire-oriented, and white-supremacy-serving, based on hate and fear.
It is true that Sanders and “The Squad” have not succeeded in taking over the Democratic Party and ousting the establishment Democrats from Congress in the way that the extreme conservatives ousted the moderates in the Republican Party. And they have faced intense opposition and dirty maneuvers at the hands of the establishment Democrats. And, arguably, Sanders and the others have been more conciliatory, and less hostile, and have made more concessions to, the establishment Democrats than the extreme conservatives were with the moderate Republicans. But that is not because the Democratic Party is some kind of static entity, with barriers that cannot be overcome. It is because the organic SOCIAL base underlying Sanders and the others, the kind of base that is built over years, through processes that lie primarily outside the realm of electoral politics, was not as large and organized as that of the conservative Republicans. Progress has been made, but there is a ways to go.
Ultimately, the capitalists will never let us vote capitalism and their power and privileges away. We will have to defend against the capitalists’ use of force when we have grown to be a significant threat. And to do that the vast majority of people must unite around an anticapitalist agenda and be willing to fight for it by all means necessary. But engaging in electoral politics along the way, and pushing our agendas in a representative body like the Congress, for as long as they let us, will serve to DOCUMENT that our anticapitalist agenda is indeed becoming, more and more, the conscious will of the people.[2] And continually documenting that in this way, by measuring votes, is a process that will promote an awareness that the people in the movement truly own the movement, that they are the real protagonists of the movement. And it will make crystal clear, when the capitalists move to suspend democratic functioning, that the capitalists only allowed formal democracy when the people were manipulated into giving them what they wanted. And this same documentation of the people’s will through the people’s participation in the existing democratic institutions, and the resulting consciousness of popular ownership of the movement, can help prevent this necessary growing militant force that began as a mobilization to defend the will of the people against anti-democratic forces from devolving into a monster whose leaders concentrate power in themselves while only pretending to defend the will of the people.[3]
But a key point that I want to make here is that the number of people that it takes to defend post-capitalist transition against the capitalists’ violent anti-democratic responses is GREATER than what it would take to take over the Democratic Party. If we become large enough to be able to overcome capitalist anti-democratic violence, then overcoming the shenanigans of the likes of Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Democratic “superdelegates” to stop our insurgent candidates could be a piece a cake by comparison. So we should do that when we are able to, to maintain the democratic reality and legitimacy of our movement as we are growing, as discussed in the above paragraph. Running insurgent candidates in primaries, using only small donations, has shown surprising success, as steps toward that goal. It terrifies the donor class, because winning without money deflates the power of money to buy political outcomes. No wonder it has provoked such fierce and devious responses on the part of the establishment Democrats and their corporate media allies! And so it continues to be, in my opinion, a strategy worth pursuing, as a complement to deeper processes of building the underlying social forces.
Our response to setbacks in this difficult project should not be to go off and splash around in an isolated bathtub somewhere, and call that serious politics.[4] We need to build social forces, and their emerging political expressions, into a tsunami that can overflow the dikes.
[1] It makes no sense to call for ranked choice voting and/or proportional representation, as the Green Party laudably does, and then act as if the limitations imposed by our system’s lack thereof can be overcome by magic. With these measures in place, a small party can run candidates at any stage of its growth. Without them, in the US system as it is, we must grow our movements through non-electorally-centered means, and run candidates on our own ballot line only when we are large enough to make the Democrats, and not ourselves, the spoiler. But even with RCV and/or PR in place, the bulk of activity that it takes to become a hegemonic political force (so as to be able to run candidates without being a spoiler, in the current US system, or to form governments in the less retrograde democratic systems of Europe and elsewhere without having to form coalitions with suboptimal partners), still takes place outside of electoral campaigning.
[2] At a later stage, the revolutionary movement’s own internal institutions and practices of a more direct and participatory kind of democratic functioning may come to encompass the whole of society, replacing the representative institution of Congress as an inferior and redundant means of expressing and implementing the will of the people. But we must take care to only replace imperfect institutions with BETTER ones, not worse ones.
[3] The envisioned movement thus bears little resemblance to the “Communist” states of the 20th Century, or to what our societies would turn into if the leaders of any of a number of “revolutionary” sects today that are inspired by those states somehow succeeded in carrying out a revolution under their leadership. The opposition of the latter to revolutionaries participating in a genuine and serious way in the current institutions of electoral politics, in my opinion, reflects their interests as would-be elites of a coordinating or managerial class that would substitute their will for the will of the people, while claiming to embody in themselves the will of the people. (Cf. Evo Morales’s Twitter/X handle “evoespueblo”.) How the virtually impossible hypothetical outcome of any of these sects leading a victorious revolution would work out if it really happened is clearly seen in their own disastrous and tyrannical internal functioning.
[4] The only really politically serious thing about Stein and the Greens being their ability to spoil elections and promote the greater evil.
The Practical Challenge, In Brief
A More Effective Strategy Than Third Parties, Part I
A More Effective Strategy Than Third Parties, Part II
A More Effective Strategy Than Third Parties: The Really, Really Short Version
Why We Should Expect Trump To Be Worse