Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently made headlines for calling perennial Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein “predatory” and “not serious.” AOC is right.
Giving voters more choices is a good thing for democracy. But third-party politics isn’t performance art. It’s hard work — which Stein is not doing. As AOC observed: “[When] all you do is show up once every four years to speak to people who are justifiably pissed off, but you’re just showing up once every four years to do that, you’re not serious.”
To be clear: AOC was not critiquing third parties as a whole, or the idea that we need more choices in our democracy. In fact, AOC specifically cited the Working Families Party as an example of an effective third party. The organization I lead, MoveOn, supports their 365-day-a-year efforts to build power for a pro-voter, multi-party system. And I understand third parties’ power to activate voters hungry for alternatives: I myself volunteered for Ralph Nader in 2000, and that experience helped shape my lifelong commitment to people-first politics.
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Your motivations can be whatever you want. You just don’t get to absolve yourself of responsibility for the results of your actions. I think that’s a fair position.
I will take responsibility for enabling one of the two genocide enablers that I can choose from, yes. I am choosing to enable the one that contains a modicum of dissention from the status quo vs the one that wants to wipe Gaza from the map entirely.
Why would you want to enable the party that wants even more genocide than the Democrats do?
i’m not going to take responsibility for the policies of someone i vote against. that makes no sense.
