Generally, it's good to do strategic thinking in politics. If you have a political goal, you need a means of achieving it, and not just an idea. Of course, recognizing the need for strategic thinking does not mean that ideas are of no importance -- both good ideas and strategic thinking are necessary.

But strategic thinking needs to recognize historic circumstances, and this is where Kate Aronoff's "The Left Deserves Better Than Jill Stein," a piece put forth last week (September 26, 2016) in In These Times, needs to go forward. Unfortunately, in this piece Aronoff can do no better than to suggest "deep organizing" as a solution:

...the Green Party’s stumble toward the presidency falls into the same traps that plague conventional Democratic Party politics: putting too much emphasis on the presidency and the electoral process itself, while declining to undertake the kind of deep organizing necessary to alter the state of play in these arenas.

Now doesn't that sound profound? The quote from Antonio Gramsci no doubt makes it even more so. And indeed Aronoff is correct to say that "the Green Party does not have a plan to build power." The problems with the Green Party, however, are problems intimately related to the political history of the Green Party in the United States, considered in context.

The Green Party is composed of whomever was left after everyone else who was interested in American politics deserted it for the Democratic Party over the years, most especially in 1992 when Bill Clinton was running for President for the first time and the Green Party was just getting started in the US. I remember the enthusiasm back in 1992 -- we had a vibrant local with regular members, a candidate for Congress, and a candidate for the State Assembly. It was a happening that could have attracted effective activists. But it didn't, and it fell apart after 1992.

At any rate, if the Green Party is characterized by "ineffectiveness" and "infighting" today, as Aronoff suggests, it is because the Green Party is a small, sectarian party today, and because ineffective infighters are what you see in small, sectarian parties. Small, sectarian parties, moreover, are composed of those few people who have vowed, over the years, to continue the fight, rather than heading for the seeming safety of spending eight years pretending Obama was a leftist, which is what the nice political conformists did here in America.

If you want to blame the Green Party for being ineffective, then, the first place to begin is with the activists who should have joined it back in 1992 but who instead spent the past twenty-four years pretending that everything would be totally kewl if only America had some more and better Democrats in office. Was Democratic Party cheerleading really the most effective use of time for such people?

The clinging to the ruling-class party was so strong over those years that it even controlled the Green Party itself; a case in point was the disaster in Milwaukee in 2004, in which the national convention chose non-candidate David Cobb as its Presidential candidate despite the much greater popularity of another Ralph Nader run. So you do the math. If so many activists in the Green Party, an already tiny entity relative to the US as a whole, really only want more and better Democrats, should it be any great surprise that the party itself is characterized by "infighting"?

All that's significant about the Green Party in the United States, twenty-six years after its founding, is that it offers a ballot line. If the "Left" were really interested in the Green Party, it would have taken over the Green Party quite some time ago. But at this point in the game the Green Party has become a protest vote, and only a protest vote, for people who wanted, and who now want, just such a thing.

Perhaps at this point the "Left" wants a party of its own. One option is of course to attempt another takeover of the Democratic Party. You'd think that, after more than a century of trying this strategy, its proponents would notice the general lack of success. Another option is to transform the Green Party into something more than a sectarian party offering protest votes in places where the ballot access laws permit them. A third option is to start a new party. What's curious is that, after thirty-six years of neoliberal governance with more on the way, so incredibly few people want to examine all the options.

If you want to blame someone for this sad situation, blame the likes of Kate Aronoff, who tells us that:

The Left has never needed to be more interested in winning than it does in 2016, using every tool available—the Democratic Party included—as a means to that end.

without asking the most basic question about the Democrats: who is using whom as a tool? If the "Left" in America is going to get behind Bernie Sanders, and if Sanders is going to end up "losing" thanks to election "irregularities" and then endorsing the beneficiary of said "irregularities" without so much as demanding an investigation, who is using whom as a tool? Or, as Ted Rall put it:

So how is that in any way a "Left" strategy? You know, if you want to do "deep organizing" rather than just using profound-seeming phrases like "deep organizing," it helps to have something out there to MOTIVATE people to "organize deeply." That's what Bernie Sanders used to provide. It doesn't come with chastizing the Green Party for putting too much emphasis on Jill Stein.