They say speak no ill of the dead.
BUT…you still should be able to talk about the Party.
This clip is making the rounds online. I never met David Cobb and never had any personal grievance with him. A Progressive attorney from Texas, he died on September 7 aged 63.
BUT, and this is a big BUT, there is no denying that this is the video where the Green Party committed what we now know was ritualistic suicide. Cobb and his fraction of the Green Party were never able to stomach the animosity from Democrats that came as a result of Ralph Nader’s 2000 presidential campaign. Then-Senator Joe Biden had famously exclaimed in a 2001 New York Times post-election column “Ralph Nader is not going to be welcome anywhere near the corridors. Nader cost us the election.”
As a result, the right wing of the Greens, with David Cobb as their candidate, developed and executed a plan to successfully defeat Ralph Nader’s nomination in the 2004 Green Party convention. There were hoops and technicalities invoked, including the claim that Nader did not qualify because he was not formally affiliated with the Greens, but it was transparent that they had been erected in order to manufacture Cobb’s nomination.
Alongside Nader was the late Peter Camejo, who had been a prominent member and presidential candidate for the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party in the 1970s. Camejo had returned to electoral politics after studying Lenin’s writings and the Sandinista Revolution, coming to grasp a uniquely American Progressive politics had to reflect national realities and nuances while ejecting sectarianism. But furthermore, along with Nader, Camejo understood third party politics had to be confrontational and that the animosity from the Democrats proved how effective the Greens truly were. The Nader-Camejo ticket was going to try taking votes away from the Democratic candidate John Kerry and it genuinely alarmed many, including a sizable number of leftists like Noam Chomsky.
Cobb and his Vice Presidential nominee Pat LaMarche decided to run the most pathetic “safe state” campaign, telling voters in Swing States to vote for Kerry. While individual state parties and Left Greens like Howie Hawkins tried to support Nader’s independent candidacy rather than Cobb’s, the damage was done and neither the Greens nor Nader as an independent candidate would ever return to the prominence reached in 2000. These days it is lucky if a Green Party meeting can fill a small Shriner’s dining room, let alone Madison Square Garden. Likewise, Nader is permanently marginalized by the liberal editorial boards of major news organizations. It is very obvious that the absence of his voice in the Congressional Record has been detrimental for American consumers.
There is something very painful about this fact for many Progressives. There is no denying that the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have accomplished in one decade that which Greens have not in the thirty years since Ralph Nader ran his first limited test campaign for president on the Green ticket in 1996.
First, in the immediate sense, Cobb’s anti-confrontational stance made it possible for the Democrats to campaign using a right-wing argument, that Kerry would be a more competent Commander-in-Chief in Iraq as opposed to pursuing immediate withdrawal. If Kerry had a viable opposition from the Left vocalizing immediate withdrawal of military forces from Iraq and Afghanistan, it could have easily reshaped the national dialogue and ended those two abysmal quagmires more than ten years earlier. Kerry’s preposterous hawkishness on Iraq made him the perfect target for Karl Rove and the Swift-boat Veterans controversy where fellow Vietnam GIs publicly accused him of cowardice. In this sense, Kerry’s campaign pulled the entire party rightward, something that became increasingly evident during the first term of the Obama administration.
Second, Greens have refused to adequately address the multitude of structural issues that prevent their success. As a federation of individual state parties, they lack a strong national authority that can make determinations and judgments on important issues. This means that the definition of everything from Party membership to political views to operating methods is highly subjective and variable; as just one example, the Greens have an ugly history of being infiltrated by Libertarians and other reactionaries. It is fundamentally impossible for the organization that calls itself the Green Party of the United States to be equated with earlier Progressive parties like the Socialist or Communist Party insofar as the Greens lack meaningful national leadership that guided these two parties. Their European contemporaries in the UK and Germany have much more serious membership and party organization structures.
Third is the animosity toward dues. The Greens have been extremely opposed to a dues-based membership system, claiming it qualifies as a poll tax. The reality is that they lack a meaningful sustainable income stream to finance growth and development of their party infrastructure. Greens in Rhode Island have no distinct party office for the planning, development, and execution of various campaigns, instead it is solely reliant upon a charitable giving model that hinders a sustainable budget.
Fourth is the undeniable habit of racialized tokenism and animus reported by BIPOC Greens. This manifests as a result of the inability of the Party to make significant inroads into these communities. In spite of a platform that has all the right notions of racial justice, the membership issues remain unresolved.
Why did DSA succeed?
First is the confrontational approach that they took towards the establishment. The right wing of the Greens were inclined towards fusion-ballot politics as opposed to complete partisan independence. But in that context, the lack of a coherent economic policy on par with DSA’s brand of social democracy and welfare spending made the Greens seem like liberal Democrats trying to promote renewable research and development locally. And again, as demonstrated by the 2004 campaign, this right wing also desired to be liked by the Democratic Party.
Second is the coherent structural approach that is to be found nationally with all DSA chapters. A multitude of caucuses exist within the organization, including a tendency that desires to eventually break away from the Democratic Party and run independent candidates. But as a national organization, there are certain norms and bylaws which regularize and standardize the operations of a DSA chapter. Matters like dues and positions on Israel/Palestine have been debated and resolutions have been passed at the national convention, leading to culture shock for an elder strata of members who joined before 2016 (when I first became politically active, the DSA was an old man’s outfit chocked full of liberal Zionist nuts).
Third is the infrastructure. Besides dues, bylaws, caucuses, and other structures, DSA has access to proprietary software that the Democrats use for their campaigns. Beginning in the mid-2000s, Silicon Valley liberals created a proprietary software program, NGP VAN, that provides vital software for both regular computers as well as phone apps, including voter role databasing and mapping for campaign canvassing. NGP VAN is such a powerful software platform that unions and nonprofits like Planned Parenthood use it in their own campaigning as well. The independent software community can develop certain elements replicating NGP VAN but a tremendous level of that infrastructure relies upon servers and networks costing top-dollar.
Fourth is simply the fact that DSA was overtaken by the Sanders generation of voters. The sheer force and level of inundation made it impossible for old guard members to prevent the passage of bylaws and resolutions regarding everything from dues to Palestine solidarity. Maurice Isserman, one of the founding members and a lifelong Zionist, made a public scene and resigned. This new generation defied all expectations (including my own) and successfully have elected candidates to levels of office no Green ever reached. This is particularly shameful in New York; for decades, fusion-line voting has been responsible for the election of social democrats up to and including Fiorello La Guardia as Mayor. In the past 25 years, any Green in New York could have followed La Guardia’s path or something similar; the fact a Muslim immigrant from Uganda accomplished this was due to the successful organizing and mobilization of this insurgency. In the case of the Greens, Cobb and his wing of the Green Party constantly smothered and red-baited perceived “enemies” to their Left.
However you feel about the Green Party and its impact on Progressive politics in the past three decades, the unavoidable reality is that it could have done so much better and chose not to by nominating David Cobb. A decade after the Jill Stein-Ajamu Baraka 2016 campaign, it is hard to deny that what was perceived as a renaissance was instead the last hurrah. While Baraka’s politics were much more serious and grounded in a Progressive politics rooted in the Black Radical Tradition, Stein was a people-pleaser who ultimately showed her true colors on Election Night as a right wing Green. Rather than embrace their national spotlight to go on a nationwide post-election tour of the nation, Stein hired a cotillion of attorneys to litigate voter recounts in states Clinton lost to Trump. This fundamentally took power out of the hands of the base and centralized it in the hands of Stein’s litigation efforts, a matter focused on her as the plaintiff as opposed to Greens as her supporters.
Besides Peter Camejo, Bruce Dixon and Kevin Zeese passed away, robbing the party of some of its most respected and active leaders. The Greens are seen as a dead end by many. Third party politics is more than just the Greens and has been for more than a century. Whether members of DSA will form their own party has yet to be seen.
