On "The 'Jill Stein' Vote"
"Either this nation shall kill racism, or racism shall kill this nation." (S. Jonas, August, 2018)
"A Vote for 'ABBB' (Any Body But Biden) is a Vote for Trump and Republo-Fascism" (S. Jonas, March, 2024)
Theodore Roosevelt speaking from a car in Milwaukee Wisconsin on Oct. 14%2C 1912.webp.
The most successful 3rd Party candidate in U.S. history: prevented his former Vice-President from winning re-election as President.
"Voting for Jill Stein," or Cornel West, or any one of three candidates of three different parties the names of which all begin with the word "Socialist," has once again become a topic of conversation among various elements of the "Left" in the United Sates. Some leftists, including myself, think that voting for a "left" third party candidate is not a good idea (actually that it is a really horrible idea), particularly in the upcoming election. It is now well-known that one of the two major party candidates has made it very clear that if elected he will rip up the bourgeois-democratic Constitution adopted in 1789 and amended 27 times since and replace it an off-the-cuff fascist version of his design. Actually, the basis of Trumpfacism not an off-the-cuff version. The "rearrangements," shall we say, begin with something called "Project 2025" produced by the Heritage Foundation, and go on from there. Trump's own version, provided for us at length, in the vernacular rather than in a semi-formal, almost academic document that "2025" is (Trump, a man of very limited education/reading, couldn't do "academic" even if he wanted to), is openly revealed in a lengthy recent interview with TIME Magazine.
Whether or not voting for a Third-Party candidate can help one or 'tother of the two major party candidates win goes back at least as far as the 1912 election. In that year, Teddy Roosevelt, who had been a Republican Vice-President and then President (upon the assassination of William McKinley) was unhappy with the policies of his Republican successor, William Howard Taft. He ran independently on the "Bull Moose Party" ticket and received about 27% of the vote (higher, by the way, than Taft's 24%). (His platform, as it happened, included a proposal for National Health Insurance, modeled in part on what Great Britain's Labour Party was proposing at the same time. A version of British NHI --- the National Health Service --- was implemented on July 1, 1948. Obviously, there is nothing close to it in the US.) So, Teddy did help to defeat Taft in a big way in the 1912 election. In 1948, the Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace got about 2,000,000 votes but Truman won anyway.
Coming closer to our own time, in the 2000 election, in Florida alone Ralph Nader got about 90,000 votes. With a margin of 535 votes in Florida, and a HUGE boost from a Republican-dominated Supreme Court, G.W. Bush won Florida's electoral vote, won the Presidency, and went on to "9/11," the expansion of the "Afghanistan War," and "Iraq." To this very day Nader and his defenders/acolytes do not place responsibility for any of the subsequent events at his feet. (This time around, fearing Trump fascism, Mr. Nader is urging people to vote for Biden, not any third-party candidate.)
Which brings us down to 2024. Considering third party candidates, Jill Stein ran on the Green Party ticket in both 2012 and 2016. In the five "swing states" that gave Trump his 2016 victory, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida, Pennsylvania and Minnesota, his total winning margin was about 75,000 votes. That happened to be the number of votes that Dr. Stein got in those states. What does that show? Absolutely nothing definitive. But hey. IF they had gone to Clinton instead, they MIGHT have thrown the election to her. We will never know, of course.
Dr. Stein is running for the Green Party nomination again. As it happens, I like Jill Stein. How could I not? We graduated from the same medical school, 15 years apart. (I'm the older one.) But as many of my readers already know, along with many other observers I think that the country is headed for disaster (from the perspective of maintaining some form of bourgeois Constitutional democracy) if Trump is elected, along with the Party that he has totally taken over (with the full cooperation of most of the leading lights in and financial supporters of that Party). This picture of Trumpacism represents reality for most observers. Nevertheless, Dr. Stein is hoping to run again, on the Green Party ticket, and there are other left-wing political figures, like Prof. Cornell West, who would like to do the same thing, either on the Green Party ticket or some other one.
(I am not dealing with RFK Jr. In terms of both his policies and what effect he might have in the General Election, he is a total wild-card. I do have to say, if it looks like he would take more votes away from Trump than either Dr. Stein or Prof. West or whom-have-you would take from Pres. Biden, I say: "Run, Bobby; Run.")
And so, I will now turn to an edited (for length) list of "why I will vote for Jill Stein" comments (in quotation marks), sent around on an open list-serve, with a comment or two from me. Interestingly enough the list begins with the following statement: "Granted, a vote for Jill may be a vote for Trump, but it is a lot more than that. It is so much more important than that, so I will vote for Jill anyway for the following reasons." Readers can make what they will of that one. My comments on the positions below are in parentheses.
1. "Who wants to vote for genocide? Genocide Joe cannot be morally justified as he has also supported every US imperialist war, costing millions of innocent lives. Now he is burying children alive in rubble. Or burning them alive. Who can vote for that?" (Well, actually it is the Israeli Nationalists who are in the process of destroying Gaza [a topic on which I have written extensively], but, at least up to right now, the U.S. has been supplying much of their weaponry. But if one is to vote for Trump, has there ever been any indication that he would not be an even stronger supporter of Israeli Nationalism [like he was in moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem which he did] as Biden has been to date?)
2. "Granted that Trump is a liar, a racist, a sexist, a homophobe, an arch-capitalist, a wannabee dictator, a Zionist, a disgusting man. But he did not kill anywhere near the innocent folks that Biden killed when he had the chance. Peace activists cannot choose a polite genocidalist over an obscene pretender." (Let's see. The Biden Administration has been pushing the Two-State Solution [admittedly with no success], which Trump showed no interest in when he was President. And Trump is indeed "a liar, a racist, a sexist, a homophobe, a wannabee dictator, a disgusting man," none of which Pres. Biden is. Nuff said there.)
3. "Jill Stein tells the truth, which neither major corporate party leaders do. Biden lies for all the wars, present and past. I want to vote for truth. Without truth, democracy is impossible. Election campaigns can be about education or mis-education." (I agree on that one. And yes, indeed. Both major parties lie, but the Trumpublicans do it much more, and much more dangerously, than the Democrats do.)
4. "Biden claims the election is about democracy. That is a lie. We do not have a democracy." (Well, we do have a bourgeois/capitalist democracy which in my view is better than a dictatorship. But Trump and democracy, even of the bourgeois-capitalist kind?
Again, see "Project 2025" and his recent interview in TIME magazine.)
5. "Trump says he will be a dictator. But he will not succeed." (Well, there are alternate views on that one. Dictator for a day [ha, ha, ha]? The first thing he would do on Day One would be to extend his dictatorship for a day, then another, then another . . . Mass demonstrations? Just wait until Trump unleashes his version of the Nazi Brown-shirts on any anti-Trump demonstrators.)
6. "Elections every 4 years are not the most effective way to get desired policies. All great changes were won in the streets and suites. They were only ratified by elections." (Ah yes. And the mass organizations needed to implement these actions are where?)
7. "When our political system of two corporate parties rigs our choice between Hermann Goering and Heinrich Himmler, it is time for leftist political rebellion. Jill Stein is leading that rebellion." (I will let that ahistorical one stand by itself.)
8. "Trump will not be allowed to push the nuclear button. The Pentagon will not let him. When he was making irrational threats, General Milley told Putin to disregard Trumps ranting. Fox News accused Milley of treason, but nothing came of it. Instead, Fox News was sued and their top guy fired." (Wishful thinking. What are the chances that Trump will appoint a General Milley as Chairman of the Joint Chief? The pardoned felon Michael Flynn is a much more likely choice for Trump.)
9. "If Americans prioritize domestic issues over genocidal wars, how is that qualitatively different than 1934 Germans who supported Hitler for domestic perks." (Like the Autobahns. But, did Mussolini really make the trains run on time? Well, no.)
10. "Genocide Joe is squandering the US treasury on wars, which defund social programs or increase the national debt which is a gigantic giveaway in interest to big banks that bribe Congress." (And Trump's different program is???)
11. "The Democrats need Trump. Without a bogyman, the corporate Dems won't be able to scare voters to vote a false lesser of evils. Biden is running on a platform of 'I am not Trump' so he does not need to promise doing much for anyone." (Actually, before making a statement like this, one should take a look at the 2020 Democratic Party platform, a likely model for 2024. With a divided Congress, and a Republican-run Supreme Court appearing as a Third Branch of the legislature, the Dems. have not been able to do all of that stuff, but at least they're not hyping "Project 2025.")
12. "The corporate tycoons that finance candidates are not dumb. They hire intellectual prostitutes to dream up ways to bamboozle voters. But workers are not stupid either. The Green Party is absolutely necessary to mobilize the working class against the sham democracy we are subjected to." (Oh, does that mean just like the Green Party mobilized workers in 2016 and 2020?)
13. "The Democrat establishment has not put Trump in jail where he belongs, possibly on purpose. Quo Bono? [Who benefits?] The corporate Dems need Trump on the loose to suit their nefarious corporate and military interests. However, the Dems may jail him at the last minute if their calculations change." (The way the trials are going, or rather not going, I wonder just how that would happen.) "If he is jailed, we need not fear voting for Jill." (Not true. Eugne Debs ran from prison in 1920 and in a much smaller voting population got about 1 million votes. With his election-fixing apparatus in full swing, Trump could win from prison.) "It is expected that his trials and appeals will not be over before the elections. If Trump is elected, he will be confronted with trials during his term, which will tend to reduce his outrageous policies."
My comment here: Actually, if Trump were to be re-elected, as soon as possible, in one way or another, he would shut down every single legal action against him, criminal or civil, with remarkable speed. Trump is not in prison because: Merrick Garland moved with the speed-of-molasses; Trump has a Republican-in-his-pocket in Florida; Trump has a Supreme-Court-majority-in-Washington in his pocket; District Attorney Willis in Atlanta made a very bad decision concerning her personal life; and assuming conviction in New York City, the appeals process will keep him out-of-prison until after the election. As for the other, Federal, actions against him, they would be dropped by the Trump "Justice" Dept. quicker than you can say --- whatever you would choose to say.
And so, dear reader, a "Lucky 13" (of the multiple vote-for-Jill arguments) are here presented. They present a compilation of many of the arguments that are being used to rationalize the candidacies of Dr. Jill Stein and a variety of other "left-wing" candidates. (I put "left-wing" in quotes, because the Number One objective for left-wingers, in the view of many of us, now must be to prevent Trump, supported by his Fascist-Trumpublicans, from becoming President again.) Progressive third-party candidates in the swing states, running on a platform as laid out in part above, that is, Biden-must-be-defeated-because-of-if-nothing-else-his-policy-on-Israel-Palestine (which seems to be changing, slowly to be sure), could very well tip the election to Trump, just as may have happened in 2016.