Jill Stein, the 2024 Green Party
presidential candidate, during an event with Workers Strike Back and the
"Abandon Harris" campaign at the Bint Jebail Cultural Center in
Dearborn, MI on Friday, Oct. 6, 2024.
(Photo by Dominic Gwinn /
Middle East Images / Middle East Images via AFP)
Jill Stein's Dangerous Game Could Put Fascist Trump Back in the White House
Running for president and keeping an iron grip on the once-noble
Green Party has become Stein’s singular mission. And she’s killing the
Party — and its once-sterling reputation — in the process.
Oct 10, 2024
Jill Stein doesn’t give, as the old saying
goes, a flying **** about democracy. Instead, she’s all about how famous she
can become and how much money she can grift off her repeated presidential
campaigns. It’s a damn dangerous game. Fresh off her 2016 political
quacksalvery, in which she handed that year’s election to Donald Trump,
this professional grifter — who’s been doing real damage to the Green Party for
over a decade — is trying to get Trump back into the White House. As her
Wisconsin campaign manager, Pete Karas, told Politico:
“We need to teach
Democrats a lesson.”
Arguably, Democrats have already learned
that lesson. In 2016, Hillary Clinton lost Wisconsin to Trump by 22,748 votes; Stein carried 31,072
votes. In Michigan the story was similar: Clinton lost to Trump by 10,704 votes while Stein
carried 51,463. Ditto for Pennsylvania, where Trump won by 44,292 votes and Stein pulled in 49,941 votes.
Had Clinton carried those three states she would have become president.
The
Green Party — that I safely voted for in 2000 when I lived in non-swing-state
Vermont — deserves a candidate who’ll work to produce real change rather than
simply run repeated vanity campaigns that cripple our admittedly flawed
electoral system.
Those slim margins may be a distant memory,
however, given how hard Stein is pounding on Wisconsin, Michigan, and
Pennsylvania Democrats against President Biden’s unfortunate support of
Israel’s brutal bombing campaign in Gaza.
As Newsweek reported last week:
“In Michigan, a
battleground state where the Greens are campaigning hard, and which has a large
Arab American community, 40 percent of Muslim voters backed Stein versus just
12 percent for Harris and 18 percent for Trump, according to a late August poll
by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
“Michigan has more than 200,000 Muslim voters and 300,000 with Middle Eastern
or North African ancestry. Biden won there in 2020 by 154,000 votes,
while Trump carried the state with a victory margin of just 10,700—or 0.23
percent—in 2016.
“In Wisconsin, the CAIR poll showed Stein on 44 percent and Harris on 29
percent, while she also leads the Democrat candidate among Muslims voters in
Arizona.”
I moderated
the 2012 presidential debate between Stein and Libertarian Gary Johnson; she
and Johnson both had the smell of cheap political hustlers to me then, a
feeling that’s only been reinforced in the years since. Stein certainly
hasn’t done much to advance the stated goals of the Green Party. Back in
the day, it was the Greens leading the charge against climate change and in
favor of instant runoff voting, having considerable success with the latter.
David Cobb, a Texas environmental attorney, ran on the Green ticket in
2004 and was a regular on my radio program that year. He explicitly told
people listening to my show in swing states to vote for John Kerry instead of
him, calling it his “safe states” strategy. He refused to campaign or even
appear in battleground states, a statement of both high integrity and real
patriotism.
Stein has neither. This is her third
run for president (Howie Hawkins was the Green candidate in 2020 and was not on the ballot in most swing states.) Instead, she’s
bragging about how she’s going to hand the 2024 election to Donald Trump.
Presumably she’ll be spared the imprisonment that Trump says he’s preparing for the rest of us in politics and the
media. As Stein boasted to Newsweek:
“Third Way found that,
based on polling averages in battleground states, the 2020 margin of victory
for Democrats would be lost in four states — Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina
and Wisconsin — because of third party support.
“So they can’t win. There’s a fair amount of data now that suggests the
Democrats have lost. Unless they give up their genocide.
“We’re doing outreach all the time to a lot of different groups, but it’s
really been the Muslim Americans and Arab Americans who have really taken this
campaign on like it’s theirs — like they have enormous ownership over this.”
Running for president and keeping an iron
grip on the once-noble Green Party has become Stein’s singular mission.
And she’s killing the Party — and its once-sterling reputation — in the
process. As Alexandria Ocasio Cortez said:
“If you run for years in a
row, and your party has not grown, has not added city council seats, down
ballot seats and state electives, that’s bad leadership. And that to me
is what’s upsetting.”
As Peter Rothpletz wrote for The New Republic in an
article titled Jill Stein Is Killing the Green Party:
“As of July 2024, a mere
143 officeholders in the United States are affiliated with the Green Party.
None of them are in statewide or federal offices. In fact, no Green
Party candidate has ever won federal office. And Stein’s reign has been a
period of indisputable decline, during which time the party’s membership—which
peaked in 2004 at 319,000 registered members—has fallen to 234,000 today.”
Stein brought along a Fox “News” film crew
when she crashed the 2016 Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia,
cementing her reputation as a hustler who’ll hook up with anybody who’ll
provide her with fame or fortune. There are, apparently, no Democrats in
America clean or pure or virginal enough for Stein; as Rothpletz reports, she
even attacked Bernie Sanders for being a “DC insider” and “corrupted” by corporate money. Meanwhile, her campaign,
theoretically opposed to giant monopolies and defense [sic] contractors, has
taken money from Google, Lockheed Martin, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, and McKinsey.
Stein is working hard to win the votes of
disaffected Muslims in Michigan and Wisconsin, among other swing states, and
could well deny Harris the White House this year just like she so proudly did
to Clinton in 2016.
The unfortunate reality is that our system
of democracy — created way back in 1789 — essentially requires a two-party system
because we have first-past-the-post, winner-take-all elections. The
result is that third parties always
tear votes away from the major party with which they are most closely
philosophically aligned. And the Electoral College, by creating swing
states, amplifies the problem.
Until
America adopts proportional representation nationwide (which would require a
constitutional amendment) or instant runoff voting (which could be done by
law), a vote for a third-party candidate will always damage the party most
closely aligned with it. Jill Stein understands this well, but chooses to
ignore (or to intentionally exploit) its consequences.
Most other advanced democracies use a
parliamentary or proportional representation system where the party that gets,
for example, 12 percent of the votes gets 12 percent of the seats in
Parliament. This allows for multiple parties and a more vibrant democracy.
However, it wasn’t until the year the Civil War started, 1861, that
British philosopher John Stuart Mill published a how-to manual for multi-party
parliamentary democracies in his book Considerations On Representative Government. It was so
widely distributed and read that nearly all of the world’s democracies today —
all of them countries that became democracies after the late 1860s — use
variations on Mill’s proportional representation parliamentary system.
The result for those nations is a plethora
of parties representing a broad range of perspectives and priorities, all able
to participate in the daily governance of their nation. Nobody gets shut
out. Governing becomes an exercise in coalition building, and nobody is
excluded. If you want to get something done politically, you have to pull
together a coalition of parties to agree with your policy. Most European
countries, for example, have political parties represented in their parliaments
that range from the far left to the extreme right, with many across the
spectrum of the middle. There’s even room for single issue parties; for
example, several in Europe focus almost exclusively on the environment or
immigration. The result is typically an honest and wide-ranging
discussion across society about the topics of the day, rather than a stilted
debate among only two parties.
It’s how the Greens became part of today’s
governing coalition in Germany, for example, and are able to influence the
energy future of that nation. And because of that political diversity in
the debates, the decisions made tend to be reasonably progressive: look at the
politics and lifestyles in most European nations. But until America
adopts proportional representation nationwide (which would require a
constitutional amendment) or instant runoff voting (which could be done by
law), a vote for a third-party candidate will always damage the party most
closely aligned with it. Jill Stein understands this well, but chooses to
ignore (or to intentionally exploit) its consequences.
The Green Party — that I safely voted for in
2000 when I lived in non-swing-state Vermont — deserves a candidate who’ll work
to produce real change rather than simply run repeated vanity campaigns that
cripple our admittedly flawed electoral system. It’s time to say “good
bye” to Jill Stein and rescue — and then improve — our democratic republic.
Our work is licensed under
Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of "The
Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American
Dream" (2020); "The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the
Betrayal of America" (2019); and more than 25 other books in print.
Donations
can be sent to Max Obuszewski, Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 431 Notre Dame
Lane, Apt. 206, Baltimore, MD 21212. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001
[at] comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The
master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought
the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while
the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially
their lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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