Howie Hawkins Photo by Daniel Starling / Green Pages

Political independence is the lesson of 2004 for progressives
By Howie Hawkins
Green Party of New York State

The 2004 election should jolt progressives into rejecting once and for all the self-defeating strategy of supporting the Democrats as the lesser evil. "Anybody But Bush" resulted in anything but the progressive agenda.

Progressives didn't lose on Nov. 2. They lost long before, when beating Bush became the central priority for most progressives. If Kerry had won, he would have sat down with Bush during the transition period-two Skull and Bones brothers jointly planning escalation of the war in Iraq and the corresponding neglect of social and environmental crises. The only times prominent progressives got any widespread media coverage in this election were when they joined in the Democrats' $20 million attack on the independent anti-war, anti-corporate Nader/Camejo ticket.

Working people lost the election last April when the labor movement continued to support Kerry even after he pointedly prioritized deficit reduction and a military spending hike over social spending. By June, when Kerry reassured the Democratic Leadership Council-the organized corporate force in the Democratic Party of which he is a founding member-that "I am not a redistributionist Democrat," unions should have been in open rebellion against Kerry.

Environmentalists lost the election as soon as the leadership of the big environmental groups decided to attack rather than support the Nader/Camejo ticket. Nader/Camejo was the one ticket with both the will and potential capacity to put before the nation the urgent need for demilitarization and solarization of the economy before the impending peak of oil and gas production, with the resultant breakdown of the food, heating, electrical, and other material supply lines of petro-industrial society.

The peace movement lost the election when it collapsed into the pro-war Kerry campaign, thereby giving legitimacy to the post-election escalation of the war to colonize Iraq. Because Kerry was as pro-war as Bush, it was clear long before the vote on Nov. 2 that the U.S. government, under Kerry or Bush, would escalate the war for oil in Iraq and cut domestic spending to pay for it.

The 99 percent Bush-Kerry vote should not be taken as a 99 percent mandate for sacrificing social needs at home to empire abroad. It's more like a 70 percent mandate. The Nov. 5 AP/Ipsos poll showed 7 in 10 Americans think U.S. troops should stay in Iraq until it is stabilized. But that is up 32 percent from earlier in the year, when polls showed that only a 38 percent minority, in both the May 11 CBS/New York Times poll and the Sept. 13 Harris poll, said U.S. troops should stay until Iraq is stabilized. That's what happens when two pro-war candidates debate who can best fight the war to "stabilize" Iraq, and the peace movement supports one of them. Peace movement support for the lesser evil helped turn a pro-war minority into a pro-war majority.

Progressives who supported Anybody But Bush have to face the fact that their lesser-evil strategy suffered a crushing defeat in this election. Not only did unions and other nominally progressive political organizations blow a few hundred million dollars failing to elect Kerry. Worse, progressives lost the battle of public opinion as the lesser-evil strategy took progressive demands completely out of the debate, thus enabling Kerry to join programmatically with Bush in a debate about which of them could best promote a militaristic approach to Iraq, terrorism, the PATRIOT Act, and federal spending priorities.

Progressives made no demands on Kerry. They never threatened to take their votes to the progressive Nader/Camejo ticket. Progressives marginalized themselves by allowing Kerry to take their votes for granted.

The political lesson that progressives should draw from the 2004 election is that abandoning their demands in order to support the Democrats as the lesser evil is political suicide.

Progressives can best fight the right through a party of their own that can advance a real alternative to militarized corporate plunder without compromise because it is independent of the funding and influence of the corporate/military complex. So the next four years should be about:

• strengthening the Green Party as an alternative to the bipartisan consensus of the corporate-sponsored parties;
• recommitting the Greens to independent politics;
• building independent movements for peace, justice, and the environment that are oriented toward winning people over to their demands instead of merely delivering them to the Democratic Party; and
• giving those movements independent electoral expression, especially at the municipal level where the Greens can continue to win offices, begin transformation from below by exercising the considerable autonomous powers of municipalities, and demonstrate that there really is an alternative to corporate political domination.

Howie Hawkins is a Teamster and a Green, and was the Upstate New York field coordinator for Nader/Camejo '04.

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