This is just a little reminder to those Democrats who think progressives have no option except to vote for them. If they don't start fighting to uphold the progressive values they claim to believe in, they could easily find themselves losing more and more people to a true progressive party -- the Green Party. Here's an interesting question -- how many people joining the Greens would it take before the Democrats found themselves joining the Whigs as only a historical anecdote? The graphic above is from the blog
Thurman's Notebook.
Yay!
ReplyDeleteThere IS an option, and I won't think twice about voting for what I actually want.
I'm in a "safe" state - no Democrat has won a statewide office in Texas since the mid-90's.
But more importantly, I don't want to contribute to the problem by rewarding the Democrats for acting like (but not standing up to) Republicans.
We need a second party in this country.
Nice idea but to vote for a third party today would realistically be a vote for a Republican. Imagine what the results of that would be.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.democratsforprogress.com/2011/09/03/we-all-have-a-choice-in-the-2012-election/
From an international perspective, you may be interested to know that last Sunday, the Green Party in Germany scored a big enough gain in state elections in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern to overcome the 5-percent hurdle for parliamentary representation.
ReplyDeleteThe German Greens are now represented in all 16 state parliaments, no small feat when you consider that the Free Democrats (the German libertarian party that's been around since just before the creation of the Federal Republic in 1949) is now only represented in 12 state parliaments. Their latest showing was so bad, the joke going around is that FDP (the abbreviation for Free Democratic Party) stands for "fast drei Procent" (almost three percent).
The aftermath of Fukushima was instrumental in recent Green gains in Germany. When the Christian Democrats (the conservative party) finally proposed an accelerated timetable for phasing out nuclear plants, it pointed out how far ahead of the power curve the Greens have been on this issue.
That being said, the non-parliamentarian nature of our government doesn't lend itself well to such incremental gains for minor parties. But one never knows. I'm sure the Whigs never thought they'd ever be replaced.