The Green Party's Democratic Demands

There's much to like and some glaring absences in the party's program. By Luke Pickrell

Thanks to a comment on a post about Kamala Harris, I turned to the Green Party’s program to see what it says about democracy and the Constitution. My reading focused on the program’s democratic section, which contains some solid demands and a glaring absence. This post ends with a few unsolicited suggestions for the party.

The Green Party argues that democracy exists in the U.S. but has been weakened by the influence of concentrated wealth and power (phenomena that are “inherently undemocratic”). In the face of growing apathy, alienation, and discontent stemming from little political and social influence and the actions of “power brokers,” Americans must “think deeply about the meaning of a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” Civic action is an “antidote to the corporate control of so much of our lawmaking and regulating.” The party also talks about cracking down on “political corruption” to “achieve genuine citizen participation.”

The introduction’s emphasis on community, civic participation, and “grassroots democracy” to “rekindle the democratic flame” is reminiscent of the ideas of dissident sociologist C. Wright Mills, whose work greatly influenced future Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) president Tom Hayden and many others in and around the New Left. I have a deep appreciation for Mills. I constantly use a section from The Power Elite about “the domination of the military event” to describe the generalized sense of powerlessness people experience in our country.

Regarding democracy, Mills was primarily concerned with reactivating a populace he thought had stepped away from political life and was disinterested in examining public issues. Like many well-known activists and intellectuals over the years, including Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, and Hayden himself, Mills knew about the Constitution. Also, like Zinn, Chomsky, and Hayden, Mills made a political judgment that the Constitution wasn’t of central importance. He can hardly be faulted for his decision. After all, he lived during a period (as described by Aziz Rana) when imperialism and war utterly distorted most people’s understandings of “democracy” and marginalized most dissident discourse.

Identifying the contradiction between a democratic ideology and an undemocratic political structure created by the Constitution was immensely difficult for the political actors of Mills’ generation. Unlike Mills, the Green Party names the Constitution. However, like Mills, the party lacks a concrete definition of democracy, entertains the idea that the U.S. is sort of democratic (a symptom of the previous point), and lacks a firm understanding of how the Constitution frustrates its demands.

Someone in Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) once told me that she didn’t feel comfortable judging America’s democratic credentials because she didn’t regularly vote; what could she, a non-voter, know about democracy? The implication was that she had to “participate” in order to understand democracy. Something of this vibe — democracy is participation, and participation is democracy — exists in the Green Party’s program. Does this strand of grassroots and participatory interest hinder the party’s ability to focus on the larger political structures created by the Constitution? Maybe.

It’s not that political apathy and disillusionment don’t exist. They do. The Green Party sees democracy as the antidote to political apathy. I agree: “The failure to fulfill the promise of democracy leaves millions of people in our country too discouraged to vote and others who chose to vote seemingly trapped among false and limited choices. A system that promotes full and fair representation would draw millions of people into civic life in the United States and could revive democracy in this country.”

Specific political demands put forward by the Greens include proportional representation voting systems for legislative seats on municipal, county, state, and federal levels; enacting Ranked Choice Voting for chief executive offices like mayor, governor, president, and other single-seat offices, including the Senate; expanding the number of seats in the House and electing the House from multi-seat districts by proportional representation; abolishing the Senate by constitutional amendment; reinstating public funding of presidential conventions; enacting a national right to vote law by a constitutional amendment; ensuring that citizens of the District of Columbia have the same rights and representation as all other citizens; amending the Constitution to define that money is not a form of free speech; expanding the Supreme Court and establishing term limits; and supporting the ability of cities to develop elected police commissions with the power to set hire and fire police chiefs, set policies and budgets, and independently investigate and discipline police misconduct.

In addition to more political reforms, the democracy section contains sections on community, free speech and media reform, foreign policy, domestic security, and demilitarization and exploration of space. Unlike the Kamala Harris campaign, no one can fault the Greens for lacking clear proposals. My only qualm is that there’s no mention of abolishing judicial review. Oren S spoke with us a few weeks ago about the need for proportional representation, which is a prominent demand in the program. Arguably, no third party, including the Greens, can get off the ground until there’s proportional representation, the establishment of a federal campaign commission, and massive election finance reform.

Of course, the question is how we get any of these things. The existing political system makes it impossible for the Green Party to gain power. There’s simply no way to vote the party into a position of strength from which it could enact its agenda. Even if the party did win the presidency, it would have to take every other branch of government more or less simultaneously — a condition thwarted by the Senate’s staggered election structure and the Supreme Court’s lifetime terms. Bernie Sanders would have encountered the same problem because that’s how the Constitution is designed. So, the Green Party is stuck in a paradox: It demands what it needs to be a viable third party but can only (maybe) realize those things once it’s a viable third party.

Given this problem, the lack of a call for a constituent assembly (a constitutional convention would be “a state-centered affair in which the people are hardly more than bystanders”) sticks out like a sore thumb. The program is littered with calls to amend the Constitution. How does the Green Party expect that to happen? As I explained in a previous post, Article V is a dead letter. There is no constitutional way to change the Constitution. Hence, Daniel Lazare’s assistance on understanding the history of self-legalization or “what every new political order does in replacing an old one.” Our current Constitution is one example of self-legalization. Three other examples (and ones that represent the will of the people better than the Constitution) are the Declaration of Independence, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and the English Charter. At the end of the day, politics is about power. If you have the power, you can make the rules. The Green Party makes many demands, but all of them hinge on the party establishing power through the existing political structure — an impossible task. Again, the paradox.

A revolutionary democratic movement does not yet exist in the U.S. Therefore, we must stick to the basics. My unsolicited advice: Shorten and hone the program to focus on proportional representation, abolition of the Senate, ending judicial review, and abolishing the Electoral College. These demands fall under the rubric of universal and equal suffrage, or one person, one equal vote. There’s simply too much going on in the program, and the more significant issues of the monstrous Constitution and the fundamentally unusable Article V are easy to lose through the thicket of proposals. Keep the messaging simple. This government is illegitimate. We want democracy, and the political power democracy entails.