The pragmatic left shows some results

Sam Smith - Although I was one of the founders of the national Green Party, I have become increasingly worried by the sense that the party functions more like a top down religion than like a bottom up movement. While it remains the party with the best values, understanding the truth is not the same thing as doing something effective with it.

Recently, NY Times columnist Michelle Goldberg addressed this issue and - while making a mistake by falsely claiming Ralph Nader lost the election for Gore - she does note the rise of the pragmatic left:

Rashida Tlaib, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, won her primary in Michigan, and she is now overwhelmingly likely to become the first Muslim woman in Congress. In a referendum, people in Missouri voted 2 to 1 to overturn an anti-union “right to work” law passed by the Republican legislature. In an upset, Wesley Bell, a progressive city councilman from Ferguson, Mo., effectively ousted the longtime St. Louis County prosecutor, who many civil rights activists say mishandled the investigation into the police shooting of Michael Brown, the African-American teenager whose 2014 killing set off riots.

 I have yet to see any evidence that the Green Party’s habit of running doomed third-party campaigns has ever done anything to further its ostensible values.

Greens will sometimes justify these runs as movement-building tools, but they never seem to actually build a movement. “They don’t know how to multiply themselves,” Ralph Nader once told me, explaining the dissipation of the party after his 2000 presidential run. “It’s a peculiar characteristic: Green Party people, they don’t like to raise money, they allow themselves to live in neighborhoods and communities where they become minorities of one.”

The new generation of left-wing activists, by contrast, is good at self-multiplication.... Just as the Christian Right did in the 1990s, the new electoral left — which also includes groups like Justice Democrats and the Working Families Party — is trying to take over the Democratic Party from the ground up. These activists have, significantly, focused on races for prosecutor, which is a way to create immediate local criminal justice reform. (In Philadelphia, left-wing organizers last year helped elect civil rights lawyer Larry Krasner as district attorney. Among his reforms is the end of cash bail for many misdemeanors and nonviolent felonies..

And just for the record, here are the facts on Nader's effect on Bush's victory as we published some years back:

BECAUSE OF THE CONTINUED SLANDER OF RALPH NADER by Democrats in deep denial, we went back and looked at the actual poll results in the last months of the 2000 campaign. The chart above shows the change in the average poll percentage from month to month. You will note that except between July and August during a period of minimal change, there was no correlation between Bush's percentage change and that of Nader.