The Partisan Divide on Issues

[Eric the Green]

(01-12-2022, 04:19 PM)nguyenivy Wrote: Any opinions here on the Green Party or any other 3rd party in the US? Are they outside the scope of this thread?

I was a Green Party member from 1991 to 2020, and a local official in the party for several years. Hence, one reason for my moniker. Most Greens are on the Left, and support the same issues as progressive Democrats. Greens hope to push the Democrats to stay in the progressive lane, or lose votes to them. Greens also tend to see the two parties as more like each other than like them, which is not true, and they can potentially spoil elections as they were accused of doing in Bush v. Gore in 2000. They rightly describe the Democrats and Republicans as a duopoly, which limits who can participate in making decisions and attracts big money support and consequent corruption in the 2 major parties. Greens these days are tending to describe themselves as socialists, which departs from the original conception of Greens as a new party based on new principles influenced by 1960s and 70s movements (the 10 key values and 4 pillars) instead of based on old 19th-century ones.

Instead of a duopoly the Greens propose instead a more-parliamentary system like most other democracies and quasi-democracies have, more on the British model than the American. Greens propose ranked choice voting so people can pick their second and third choices, so that the spoiler effect is reduced and more people will be emboldened to vote for whom they really want, and they support proportional representation to give smaller parties a voice in congress/legislatures. We see in Germany that the well-established Green Party there is able to enter a governing coalition and influence policy, whereas in the USA only one party can govern, and others are squeezed out or reduced to a big divide between two parties that prevents anything from getting done.