(It’s Not Easy) Bein’ Green
Alex C., July 23, 2023 –
It’s been over 50 years since Kermit the Frog sang his lament Bein’ Green, expressing sadness about being plain, common and invisible. Being Green politically isn’t easy, either, but for quite the opposite reason. We stick out like a sore thumb, albeit a green one, on the landscape of American politics. And we’re not the only ones. As of last year’s stats, the Libertarian Party has about three times the number of registered voters as us Greens do. And the two-party duopoly do their same old “better us than them” song and dance, invoking their derogatory blanket term third parties. After all, how many “thirds” are they referring to, as if we’re all the same?
Yes, we already know the tune because it’s the same tune every election. The Democratic Party will try to vilify us for voting our conscience, disregarding our fundamental disagreements about climate change response, prison reform, education privatization, immigration, wars and military intervention, healthcare, campaign funding, foreign policy, tax structure, ballot access, proportional representation, redistricting, and other mere details. In their corrupt sense of democracy, the Democratic Party views these differences as not being important enough for us to refuse to support them, playing the “lesser of two evils” card while moving further right to capture those fence-sitters in the middle. Meanwhile, the Republican Party hopes our values resonate with enough “woke extremists” to indirectly help them defeat their fellow neo-liberal competitor.
And it’s easy to get distracted by the racist, homophobic, jingoist, bigoted and hateful rhetoric that almost exclusively comes from the political right – the de facto territory of the Republican Party. But the arrogance of the duopoly, continuously working together to keep American politics a two-player game, is similar to the mentality of Manifest Destiny. These two corporate-sponsored parties act as if they have a divine right to the entire American political landscape. No voting for our own President, no proportional representation, no campaign financing reform to stop the obvious corruption of big-money politics. They could easily change these antiquated undemocratic practices in a heartbeat. But they never will. They are content to fight over a small slice of voters in the middle in a handful of states, and continue to turn their backs on obvious reforms commonly accepted by other democracies worldwide. The best they can do is reach across the aisle to each other, while no one else has a seat in the room. This is their routine, their same old song and dance, and us “third parties” are the spoilers, the misfits, the outliers not fit for democracy, naive because we just don’t understand how things work.
But we understand exactly how things work, and we want to change all that. Eating away at their thin margin, at their right to dominate with their undemocratic rules and multinational corporate funding, is the only way to truly influence their behavior. And we can only achieve this in the aggregate, as a cohesive group of dissatisfied citizens, unwilling to bow to their claims on political power by voting for them, or supporting them in any way whatsoever.