What have Nader, Stein and the Green's accomplished,

[Ken Burch]

56. That would be a good question-if any significant group of folks here were defending Nader and Stein.

Hardly anyone is.

A much larger group have simply argued that it was partly OUR party's fault that that Nader/Stein phenomenon happened-that it wasn't reasonable to expect all progressives to vote for our presidential ticket when in the times when it moved sharply to the right on policy.

That was always going to lose us the votes of a lot of people who believe politics is about working and voting for change. It couldn't NOT lose us those votes.

The only possible way to prevent that would have been for the party, after 1998 or so, to start letting the progressive wing back in from out in the cold again.

We could have said "we pretty much froze you out in '92 and '96, but that can change now. The country isn't as far to the right as it was then and there's space for more options".

The party could have said that, in exchange for progressive votes in 2000 that we would stop being as rigidly centrist after that. We could have said "this is temporary-we won't keep things this limited for the rest of eternity, and we recognize that we need you and your ideas in the future".

We could have committed to re-opening debate and discussion within the party after 2000-to restoring at least the kind of say that labor and rank and file activists had before 1989. We could have put Paul Wellstone in charge of the platform committee.

I agree that it would have been better if Gore had won in 2000. But it's as much our party's fault that he didn't as it is Nader-Nader(and the GOP people who funded him) could never have done what he did if our message in 2000 hadn't been "nothing will change-history is over".

We are now in 2017. If we don't want people on the left attacking the Democratic party from outside, the answer is to make it possible for as many of them them to work for change, to work for what they want, INSIDE this party and in a positive way-it's an exercise in futility to simply demand that they shut up and take whatever we give them.

We are a good party, but we are not an infallible party, and if we are under that kind of attack from people we might be able to make common ground with, we need to respond in some way other than just demanding that the attacks stop.

Some of the attacks go too far, but the larger points raised by the Green phenomenon are valid:

It the GOP is going to be a party of the rich, we at least need to be a party that says that what the rich want isn't more important than what the majority of people, the people who work for a living or want to, need.

If the GOP is going to be the party that backs stifling conformity, we should be the party that supports the right of everyone to be themselves and be accepted as themselves, so long as no one harms others in doing so.

If the GOP is going to be a party of war, there needs to be a party of peace for people to vote for against it-that doesn't mean being pacifist, but it does mean at least acknowledging that war should never be anything but an extreme last resort, that it should be avoided at all cost, and that even if a war is just in one short-term situation, it is also a tragedy and a failure when it comes to that.