In the CNN interview, some members of the "town hall" audience asked questions. One young man asked Stein how she'd be able to live with herself if her candidacy, as he saw it, caused Donald Trump to win the election. Stein responded by saying that she won't sleep well if Trump is elected, but neither will she sleep well if Hillary Clinton is elected.
In this one moment, Stein showed extraordinary courage. It indeed takes courage and determination to face people who seem to resent you just for running a national campaign that competes with theirs. Democrats especially resent Greens for doing it, almost giving the impression that they'd ban any third party competing for votes with the Democratic Party, if given the chance. As one who gathered signatures to get Nader on the ballot in New York in both 2004 and 2008, I ran into their hostility many times. (I also ran into plenty of people who were very happy to sign for Nader. I collected about 2000 signatures for his candidacy in '04 and about 1400 in '08.) Stein is contending with that hostility now, probably every day on the campaign trail. For that reason alone an honest person has to respect and admire her.
Trusting the Democrats has not brought us basic reforms such as single-payer healthcare. (That one isn't even in their platform!) Instead, it has led to a system for propping up private insurance companies with the IRS serving as their collection agency. It has not led to the prosecution of Lloyd Blankfein and Jamie Dimon and the other Wall Street hoodlums. Rather, it has led to the nomination of a Democratic Party nominee who stands shoulder-to-shoulder with those thieves. Bernie Sanders endorses that nominee. That's a good reason to reject the "hope" offered by the Democrats and their corporate sponsors and to vote for Stein.
A new political party--whether we're talking about a fully independent Green Party, or better yet, a completely new party of working people that makes a clear and unmistakable commitment to independence, right from the start--has to run candidates. And democracy has to have at least a few good candidates, such as Stein and Baraka, to compete with god-awful candidates such as Clinton and Trump.
Maybe there will always be corrupt, bought-off organizations like the Democratic and Republican parties selling themselves out to big banks and corporations and the super-rich people who control them. But who says they have to completely dominate our political system? To simply abandon the field to them, to take ourselves out of the equation and hand our country over to a tiny minority of sick, greedy old white men in blue suits flying into work in their private helicopters--that would just be insane. The spoiler argument is their last-ditch effort to defend their phony democracy. We need a real democracy and a real independent party of our own. All we have to do is listen politely to their wacky arguments, smile, nod our heads--and then promptly ignore everything they say. We learn by doing, not by letting other people push us around. We have a great opportunity next Tuesday to push back.
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