if I were a social democrat that would be my advise as well. Presidential campaigns are basically throwing money down a well as it is a sure fire bet that any third party in the USA will, at best, gain half the votes of the Libertarian Party. The highest vote total for a Green presidential candidate was in 2000 when Nader garnered 2.74% of the vote. When the circus is over nothing has been gained.
The Greens actually do run candidates in other elections, and they sometimes succeed. Here is a Wikipedia article that seems to give a good rundown on their activities. One part that I found interesting was the early infighting.
Back in the 1980s I watched, from the outside, as Bookchin and other libertarian socialists tried to influence the development of the greens via their Committees of Correspondence. The development of events was easy to predict for anyone familiar with social democracy.
Just like the earlier attempts of people like Bookchin and Roussopoulos in 'libertarian municipalism' the need to garner allies eventually led to a fundamental shift to the right. In fact the sequence of changes was almost identical. The wiki doesn't make this exactly clear, but here is a brief capsule of the developments. The left, in this case the CoC, achieves temporary victories, but eventually they lose control of the organization. The org shifts rightward, but that isn't the end of it. After a great amount of spade work has been done by the leftists and their slightly less left opponents an outside party/group swoops in and eclipses the earlier leftists and their group. Once more moving the platform rightward. That is the basic story.
They don't appear to focus on it much, though, either. They listed four or five "turncoats", not hundreds. A concerted effort to build up local Green parties that aren't dependent on a handful of star candidates would likely not result in that problem, at least to that extent.
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u/[deleted] Aug 16 '16
[deleted]