Why Jill Stein?

In some despair about the general run of the presidential campaign, I happened to visit the website of Green Party candidate (and old acquaintance) Jill Stein, where I found her platform (here). It was a very different experience from any other in this campaign season so far. Even Bernie Sanders's heartfelt exhortations didn't come close. What I found was (as I wrote on the site) "a rather precise description of the world I would like to live in, and would like my children and their children to inherit." It begins with a whole and comprehensive response to the climate problem and various climate justice solutions, but it doesn't stop there. It considers equity issues in the workplace, and calls for redistribution of wealth and resources at many levels in our society. Though thin on foreign policy, it envisions a major reduction in military expenditures, closures of bases, and a turn to diplomacy in place of warfare. It follows the old injunction to first see the change you want to bring about, and I feel deeply drawn to the vision laid out in this platform document.

Of course this poses a problem. As everyone knows, voting Green will help make Donald Trump our president. As a 2000 Nader voter, I heard this a lot, though I drew several different lessons: first, my Massachusetts electors were instructed to vote for Gore, and did, so my vote added nothing to Bush's (stolen) election. Secondly, the 5% of us in MA who voted Green helped put that party on the ballot, where Stein and others have added considerable wisdom to the public debate in numerous campaigns since then. And third, I was able to feel I had voted for an honorable candidate, rather than that shill Al Gore. Mutatis mutandis, I think these lessons apply pretty directly to the present case.

In particular, as we are still in the public debate stage, I would love to see Stein's platform become part of that discussion. Her ideas are both solid and creative, and deserve a whole lot more attention than they get. (I hope to add a more substantive critique soon.) Speaking of public debate, the Green and Libertarian candidates should all be included in the major televised debates. Why not? They broaden the terms of discussion, represent serious parties and doctrines, and offer real choice in an election where more than half of the voters say they really don't like either of the bigger party candidates. Stein's website contains a petition to include the Greens in the national debates. Go there and sign it. Now.

Of course as we approach November my 2000 experience will cause me to reevaluate. A Florida Nader supporter would have been well advised to make a strategic compromise in the voting booth, and I suppose the same thing could happen in various swing states this year. Then as now, I would have to say, if MA turns out to be a swing state, then there would really be no hope for a Democratic Party victory nationally. But I would take that calculation seriously.

Meanwhile I'm thinking that one of the best ways to expend my progressive political energies between now and November would be to promote Stein and the Greens, to encourage any and all to learn what she stands for, and make clear how far short Clinton's ideas fall. No, Jill probably won't win. Is that all that matters? She is saying what needs to be said, and seeing what so many refuse to see. I would like to hope that her campaign this year, if spread widely enough, will plant the seeds of a real victory--not just a default to some future Clinton--in some later, but (hopefully) not too late election. What other hope is there?

Michel Rocard and the End of Something

Have I got it wrong all these years? Was it always futile to think there was a possible alternative to the global market-based capitalist economy? Did socialism in all its forms die a slow death after 1945, and expire altogether when the Berlin Wall came down?

These thoughts arise with the death over the weekend of Michel Rocard, France's prime minister  from 1988-91, and leader of a third-way current within the Socialist Party. Rocard was by all accounts a profoundly thoughtful, intellectual politician, trained at the highest levels and introduced into France's leadership caste in the 1950s, a protégé of Mendès-France. Never a Communist though initially on the Marxist left wing of the socialist movement, Rocard became convinced in the 1970s that social democracy within the framework of civil society and a market economy was the only viable compromise for achieving the social benefits the socialist movement in its various forms aspired to. Popular, a straight-talking man of great personal integrity, Rocard with his adherents represented  the right wing of the Socialist Party formed under François Mitterand, and he and Mitterand had a famously hostile relationship. Mitterand nonetheless included him in his first cabinet in 1981, and kept him on through the disaster of that first government, where it became clear that Mitterand's classic strategies of nationalization, capital controls, an authentic state socialism, were completely untenable in a globalized economy. Rocard resigned eventually, in protest of Mitterand's dubious maneuver to introduce proportional representation into the Assembly--a move that damaged the conventional right by elevating the National Front (Thanks, Tonton).

After Mitterand won reelection in 1988, he selected the still-popular Rocard to run his government, and Rocard was able to advance a social democratic agenda, including a form of guaranteed minimum income--a modest but significant addition to the social safety net.

With Blair, Clinton, and Schroeder, Rocard can be seen as a late flowering of the socialist movement, or its moment of demise in the triumphalist 'end-of-history' euphoria of the 1990s. Mitterand fired Rocard in 1991 and sabotaged his attempt to run for president in 1995. Rocard remained an elder statesman and inspiration to a younger generation of Socialist Party conservatives, including the current prime minister, Manuel Valls.

I am inclined to view Rocard as the man who led an honorable retreat from the barricades--unlike Blair and Clinton, who crossed lines and fraternized happily with the financiers. Perhaps the very French identity of intellectual--a man of books and learning as neither Clinton nor Blair was, for all their education and intelligence--was lure enough for Rocard to remain honorably in his tradition. But his moment passed, and now he has too. What is left of the French and European socialist movement he lived in and inflected is a sorry spectacle at this moment--shrill, defeatist, rudderless. Rocard may represent the end of that tradition--certainly for the present. I would have placed myself in opposition to his moderating, social democratic ways, but maybe that's because his sense of history was more acute than mine.