PA Greens for Unity!

As it meets this weekend, the Green Party of Pennsylvania faces a momentous choice: how we participate in the upcoming national election so as to maximize our impact for electoral reform and opening political space for alternative voices, at a time when a growing segment of the population, in fact a big majority, feels increasingly alienated by the corporate duopoly and the rapidly intensifying factionalism that it's fostering, a factionalism that may break out into civil war on November 4 if either Donald Trump or Joe Biden wins on November 3.

We like to say that a Green vote is a vote against this duopoly. The problem is that, in the context of first-past-the-post voting and as a party clearly identified with the Left, we are in practice inevitably seen as objectively helping one side of this duopoly, the side that is generally feared most by the very people who are most aligned with our values.

For a few years I've been suggesting, perhaps not as aggressively as I should have, that we should make an end run around this problem by proposing a joint campaign with the Libertarians for a Presidential candidate who'd pledge to stay out of legislative issues and commit to scaling the office back to the purely administrative role the Framers intended for it, such as by ending undeclared wars and dismantling the surveillance state -- positions that appeal equally to the politically disaffected on both the Left and the Right, and which consequently wouldn't "spoil" the vote by helping one corporate party over the other. Now, a strategically similar plan has been issued by someone a bit less diffident than myself (public intellectual Bret Weinstein), and it's attracted thousands of followers: the Unity2020 Presidential Plan to Save the Republic.

The Unity2020 plan (at www.articlesofunity.org): build a popular movement to draft two highly competent, courageous patriots, one from the Left and one from the Right, who would run and pledge to govern jointly if elected regardless of who was President and who was Vice President, which would be decided by chance and reversed come reelection time. By doing so, they would directly model the consensus-seeking process that a healthy democracy requires -- a model desperately needed as an alternative to the mutual dehumanization the duopoly is promoting today at great risk to the national peace.

By Ranked Choice Voting, nearly 8000 Unity2020 supporters, myself included, voted online the other week for US Reps. Tulsi Gabbard and Dan Crenshaw as the pair we want to draft. Some notable characteristics of this pair: each is quite clearly identified with their ideological side of Congress, yet has shown they're able to work collaboratively with those on the other side rather than demonizing them. In fact, Gabbard and Crenshaw are personal friends. They actually embody the open-minded, cooperative practice that must become the norm once again if this country isn't to fall apart or degenerate into some kind of totalitarianism.

Because of the late date at which the Unity2020 plan was conceived in response to this rapidly escalating crisis -- it was publicly announced June 29 -- it was always understood that the ticket couldn't win ballot access on its own line. That's where the Greens come in. The organizers of Unity2020 are proposing that our party, the Libertarians, or both agree to withdraw our current nominees in favor of offering our ballot line to the Unity2020 ticket.

I understand that people will be reluctant to do this after having gone through our own nominating process already. And I personally like Howie Hawkins, particularly since, like me, he's identified as socialist since long before our party did. But we have a bigger responsibility than simply raising an ideological standard that we know will not get us into the White House this time. Our country needs us to think outside of the box and do something different, something that gives us a real shot at ousting the duopoly and getting an administration that would actually push for electoral reform -- as well as, by its very existence, show that alternatives to the status quo are possible.

I also understand that people will object that if our state party does this, we could be disaffiliated by the national party. And my answer to that is that it's a risk worth taking, because our status with the national party is far less important than pointing the way forward to what our party can do to help save and regenerate our democracy. We should be content to let history judge us.

Based on the above considerations, I formally propose that the Green Party of Pennsylvania publicly declare its intention to withdraw the Presidential ticket of Howie Hawkins and Angela Walker when and if the candidates nominated by Unity2020, Tulsi Gabbard and Daniel Crenshaw, state their willingness to run on our ballot line.