Health and Diet Scottish Recipes Ferret for Ferrets


Compromise [was Re: [pf] Dinner with Winona LaDuke]
by Betsy Barnum
22 November 2000 16:03 UTC

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Jill Taylor Bussiere wrote:

> First off, congratulations, Sharon!!!!!!

Ditto here, Sharon. I'm so glad you and your work got recognized that way.

> About the Greens - I imagine that will be quite a discussion we will be
> having.  I have the same question about Greens and compromise, as you know.
> Already in Wisconsin we have started that discussion. Some promote the
> compromise, and others promote the purity of the principles to be held out
> as a vision.

We've been talking about this in Minnesota, too. But I think there are many
shades of meaning to the word "compromise." Sometimes it seems to mean "go
along to get along," and it's my inference that this meaning is what the
two-party people have in mind when they question whether the Greens are "too
pure."

Others may mean the idea of giving a little on each side until you reach an
agreement. The trouble with this approach is that it really only works if the
sides are fairly equal, as in coalition governments when there are a number of
parties that need to ally with each other to have a majority or a large enough
voting bloc to accomplish anything. Definitely *not* the case at this point
with, say, Greens and Democrats. For the Green Party to bend its principles or
platform for the sake of finding common ground or to make an alliance with the
Democrats would be to give up on the vision for a very different political
system--to "compromise" in the sense of being harmed or diminished.

What many folks who are looking at the Green Party from the outside don't seem
to understand is that the Green vision isn't a set of hopelessly idealistic
principles. It is a blueprint for a humane, fair, Earth-honoring society--the
politics of joy and justice, as we were calling it towards the end of the Nader
campaign. One of the first significant implications of such a politics is that
it forges a new path, and that means it does *not* compromise with a broken,
corrupted system for the sake of power. The Green Party is not a political
party on the same model as the parties we are familiar with. It is
fundamentally different. This may not be clear yet, especially to people who
have never even considered what a fundamentally different society and political
system might look like, or that it is possible. Their calls for compromise, and
their writing off of Greens as "unrealistic" and "aging hippies" and "unable to
compromise" are indicative of nothing so much as their own inability to imagine
that things really could be different from what they are now. I hope they will
stay tuned--the politics of joy and justice has just begun.

> A fellow Wisconsin Green suggested the other day that we use a Green Screen
> to look at elected officials - looking at them through a set of principles.
> I like this, because with the Green Screen reportcard, one could offer the
> vision in those places where candidates fell down.  It would also be a way
> to determine whether a Green Candidate would be direly needed to run for a
> particular seat or not.

This is also something we're discussing--not the screen, that seems like a good
idea--but the nitty-gritty work now before us of finding races that make sense
for us to run in, and finding candidates for those races. I've just agreed to
be treasurer for a neighbor of mind who is announcing his candidacy for Mpls.
city council, and we have several other Greens pondering city council, park
board and school board candidacies. This is where the real action will be
happening in the next two years, IMO, nationwide--local mostly nonpartisan
races. We got a great influx of interested people to our Minneapolis GP
local--our meeting last weekend had more people than ever since it started
three years ago. This was due to the Nader campaign. Yea! Lots of energy, lots
of enthusiasm, lots of eagerness to get into electoral politics.

Betsy