What does Ralph Nader have to do with the Greens? People inside and outside the grassroots environmental movement have been asking that question since early summer, and haven't come up with an answer. The question is important because Nader is running for President on the Green ticket, and his candidacy has stirred a lively debate over the aims and methods of Green politics. The campaign offers some lessons to Green politicians, and to all who are in sympathy with the Greens. In the end, Nader's effort suggests that electoral politics cannot replace what Greens call "lifestyle politics."
From the beginning, the candidacy was a marriage of convenience. In positions and style alike the Greens fall somewhere between the Democratic Party and the Rainbow Tribe, tending toward the Rainbows on both points. The Green movement is a loose network of local, state, and regional organizations that combine activism and efforts at sustainable living with on-and-off forays into electoral politics. Nader is a lifelong activist against corporate abuse of politics, environment, and communities and is the founder of the Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs) that address these issues around the country. He is perhaps better recognized and more widely admired than any other living radical, in part because he exudes all the charisma of a pimento loaf in a rumpled suit.
Nader, as always, wanted a platform for his message. The Greens wanted the automatic space on the ballot that comes with a respectable share of the vote. Seeing the potential for reciprocity, Nader offered himself to the California Green Party, which named him its presidential candidate in late June. Since, Green organizations in 21 other states, including New York, Minnesota, and Washington have won ballot status for Nader. Fifteen other state groups, including the Massachusetts Greens, worked unsuccessfully to place Nader on the ballot.
There was trouble from the beginning. On the most evident level, Nader made clear that he would not tailor his anti-corporate message to fit Green convictions. Green politics, although its focus varies by state, is governed by ten "Key Values" that all Green organizations support. Some of these, like Social Justice, Grassroots Democracy, and Personal and Global Responsibility are consonant with Nader's concerns, even if he and many Greens might understand them quite differently. Because he refuses to shift his focus from its central theme, though, Nader remains pointedly silent on choice, gay rights (which he recently called "gonadal politics"--as though the Civil Rights movement had been "melanin politics"), and racial justice. This leaves him entirely alienated from the Greens' Key Values on Feminism and Respect for Diversity, as well as a critical component of Social Justice. In other words, the message that's gone out under the Green banner is an amputated version of the Green message.
This is especially worrisome for an organization that maintains a proud commitment to participatory democracy. The particulars of Green platforms are worked up democratically, and candidates are expected to adhere to all planks as a way of demonstrating that they remain answerable to their fellow Greens. In some cases, Green candidates submit questions to their constituents as they arise, letting the organization direct their stances. So, while Nader's differences with the Green platform are not breathtakingly greater than Bob Dole's from the GOP's tome of bile, his distance from the spirit of the party is different in kind. All this has some Greens wondering just what they're doing with this pimento-loaf fellow.
The Nader campaign presents a challenge to Green tactics as much as to Green values. Greens have resisted runs for national office in the past in order to develop their efforts on the local level. Although Alaska fields a quadrennial Green slate, and Roberto Mondragon made a respectable run for the governorship of New Mexico two years ago, most elected Green "politicians" serve at the municipal and county levels, where their candidates' local reputations matter more than their party affiliation. The highest-ranking elected Green so far has been the mayor of Cordova, Alaska, a delightful but unrepresentative community on Prince William Sound that can be reached only by airplane or the occasional ferry.
Nader's candidacy raises deeper issues as well. Traditionally, Green politics has been only secondarily electoral. Green organizations practice direct activism, promote sustainable living, and work to build community in their home regions. Greens are more likely to show up at demonstrations and public hearings, at food-buying cooperatives, and left-leaning service efforts than at party caucuses. A recent Green initiative in Santa Fe has placed free, untended bicycles on the streets for public use; the only requirement is leaving the bike in a visible place for the next person. While this project displays less political bite than many Green projects, it exemplifies the movement's effort to develop an alternative social economy within the dominant one--never a major concern of the Democratic or Republican parties. Throwing resources behind an attention-getting, big-name candidate represents a considerable shift in Green energies. Polls suggest that the shift has had few results.
The light reception that voters seem prepared to give Nader suggests that skeptics within the Green movement are right: the campaign is not a terrific investment. If Nader's relatively mainstream effort barely makes a dent, future ballot status alone is unlikely to mean future seats in Congress, at least in the next few years.
However, this is no reason for Greens to give up on elections, or to surrender the hope of eventually affecting large-stake contests. Rather, the Nader campaign suggests that Greens have been right to concentrate on elections that they might win--now. Local and some statewide elections have the advantage of providing factors not at play on the national level, which may tip a majority toward the Greens. In some cases, this factor is merely the extraordinary popularity of a maverick politician like Mondragon or, to take a non-Green who might do well on the ticket, former Attorney General Jim Hightower of Texas. In other cases, a local issue, most likely ecological, can mobilize citizens who wouldn't otherwise give the Greens a second look. Battles over nuclear-waste dumps, incinerators, logging, and controversial development can win Greens support on the county, municipal, or regional level that they cannot yet attain nationally.
Greens committed to elections might also benefit from a concerted effort--an effort some local groups have already taken up--to work as a fusion party in support of progressive candidates who may not identify themselves as Greens. This strategy, which has worked strikingly well for the nascent but scrappy New Party, enables Greens to affect elections without being absorbed into Democratic party mechanisms. This method improves other progressives' prospects, but also makes Greens practically relevant in a way that quixotic campaigns cannot.
The debate within the Green movement has lessons for those who aren't active members. Green principles, especially the movement's commitment to ecological sustainability, describe a radical revision of our ways of living. Radical proposals of this kind can never be only electoral proposals, for as platform planks they invariably appear utopian. "Let's be completely different than we are," regrettably, has never proved a winning slogan.
This means that Greens must work well beyond electoral politics to make viable and visible the very ways of life they propose. In proposing that the nation, or any of its communities, reshape itself radically, Greens must be able to demonstrate that their proposals can be enacted in happy, healthy lives. Otherwise, the stigma of utopianism will never disappear. The most important work for all aspects of Green politics, then, may be living in a way that explores and displays the concrete significance of Green principles. The urgency of example, of ecologically and politically exemplary lives, is never greater than when ways of life are at stake in politics.
This conclusion carries some obligation for all who are in sympathy with the Greens--for sympathy doesn't mean much more than a thrown-away protest vote. Because the personal is always, inescapably ecological, and the ecological is now very much political, both ecology and politics have claims on everyday life. This means observing the small ecological scruples that it has become fashionable to disregard, such as recycling, using two-sided paper, and refusing to accept needless packaging. It also means working to extricate oneself from the cycle of consumption and disposal, to need less and refuse more wants, to "live simply" in the words of the familiar bumper sticker. Finally and most weightily, personal politics means shaping our lives in a way that enacts principles like sustainability and community over irresponsibility and selfishness.
This last reflects itself in the jobs we will take or refuse, the sorts of houses we will buy or build, the time we will devote to civic organizations, how we will procure or produce our food, and the way we will raise our children. In all of these, we can no longer imagine that we decide only for ourselves. Our choices are also for our neighbors and communities, and so for the nation, and so, in a real way, for the planet.