By Peter Annear
SACRAMENTO — Exhilarating, challenging and touched by tension and trepidation were some of the phrases used here to describe the first conference of the California Green Party following its official registration as a state political party in January. One participant told me the Greens story was a satisfying mystery, like a good book in a series that keeps you coming back.
Increasing disillusion with the Democratic Party is one reason for the unprecedented success of the Green voter registration, as well as a feeling in the progressive movement that Jesse Jackson failed the chance to transform the Rainbow campaign into an independent political force.
It was clear many of the 300 or so attending were new to the party and to politics. While the age spread was wide, most people at the meeting were in their teens and 20s. I was told the Green groups are the third biggest campus organisation in the country.
Some participants were clearly veterans of the peace and social movements, though most had come to the party fresh from the two wings of the green movement — community activists and intellectuals — which joined in the formation of the party. The character was clearly more counter-cultural than is common elsewhere in the US left and liberal movements. But the approach was serious and the business to be conducted important, including challenging state laws that dictate the form of party rules.
In the view of many party activists, like spokesperson Hank Chapot, the party composition still needs attention. "We came from an environmentalist background, which in the US as in other countries is a predominantly white and college-educated movement. If we don't expand into the inner cities, the barrios, the border areas, the reservations and the rural areas, we will be lost."
The adoption of requirements for women's representation in the party has encouraged many activists, like Melanie Williams, a theologian, political scientist, peace and women's activist, environmentalist and party coordinating committee member who saw the party as a way to tie together her disparate interests.
"Green Party procedures on women's representation are unique to US politics", she said, but "we have a long way to go towards understanding that post-patriarchy is not just one man, one woman, one man, one woman. It means dismantling a system that provides privilege to the male voice."
The Green Party registration is a sign that the gung ho militarism of the Reagan and Bush years, and especially the Gulf War, has created something of a political backlash. It gave a great boost to the registration drive, which leapt in two months from a total of 9000 to about 25,000.
The US activists have followed closely the German Greens' experience. Chapot said they had observed "the life cycle of a political party, the rise in the polls, the election to some seats, But we are just beginning." The US Greens now have more elected local officials (covering 15 states) than any other progressive force ever, but plan no early challenges at the state or federal level.
Organisers think perhaps 10,000 to 20,000 of the 100,000 registrants will want to become active, a task likened to dragging people on to a moving merry-go-round.
Melanie Williams hoped that the registration of the Greens would be a turning point in US politics. "I will not pin my hat only on the electoral race. We have to stay in the streets and in the social movements, and it won't work unless we get a grip on the underlying causes of the problem, which requires changing the conditions that create systemic violence.
"We may fail in some ways, but the overarching thing is that we have some kind of success — measured according to our green values and not by the system we have had thrust upon us."