Why the Green Party in the United States is So Screwed Up

Jill Stein's dinner date with Vladimir Putin in Moscow says it all about the US Greens

I'm someone who believes that having only two major political parties isn't enough. Many other democracies, especially in Europe, have a wide variety of parties to choose from and all you have to do is just pick the party that you agree with the most. Here in the US your choice bogs down to Democrat or Republican. Sure there are a variety of minor parties like the Libertarian Party but they tend to go nowhere on Election Day. Part of the problem is that our political system is set up to accommodate only two political parties at a time, which isn't the case in other countries. I think that the American people would benefit from more political parties as long as they have no connection to some outside country that wants to do us harm (such as Russia).

I could go on and on about this but I'm only here to write about one of these minor political parties, which once had a lot of potential, but it is so incredibly screwed up now. This party's problems goes back decades but Vladimir Putin and Russia has exacerbated things.

With Jill Stein running for president again on the Green Party ticket, I had been thinking about writing something about these people for some time because I actually dealt with some of these people in real life. I finally decided to go ahead when I saw this video from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez about Jill Stein and the Green Party and she articulates everything I feel about them.

As someone who's older than AOC, I can explain my own memories of the Greens going as far back as the 1980s, and how I came to the same conclusion as she did.

Hopeful Beginnings

In the 1980s people in the West were starting to grow tired of the Cold War. Here in the US people it became controversial when Ronald Reagan had decided to cut much of the social programs in order to increase the US nuclear arsenal. Never mind the fact that, at the time, the US already had enough nuclear bombs to destroy the whole planet several times over. Reagan and his Republican cohorts had this mindset that being able to destroy the planet 50 times over is far better than being able to destroy the planet 25 times over, even if it did lead to an increase of more homeless people sleeping in the streets.

Of course the Soviet Union responded by building up its own nuclear arsenal at the expense of meeting the needs of its own people, even though the Soviets also had enough nuclear bombs to destroy the entire world several times over. They felt the need to add more newer nuclear bombs to the nuclear bombs they already had.

Other countries were bearing the brunt of this Cold War. Germany was literally divided into two between a communist East Germany with few civil liberties and a capitalist and democratic West Germany. The Berlin Wall served as a literal metaphor for what happened.

The West Germans were especially agitated about Reagan's nuclear arms policy because many of the nuclear bombs produced would be placed in their country. The Nena song “99 Luftballons,” which was about a young couple who released 99 balloons in the air that mistakenly triggered a nuclear war, said it all about the angst over the nuclear arms race at the time.

An English language version would become a hit in the US, even if the song was mistranslated as “99 Red Balloons.” (The song's original title really translates as “99 Air Balloons.”) It showed how paranoid people became over the renewed nuclear arms race between the US and the Soviet Union.

In 1983 a new political party known as the Greens in West Germany managed to obtain 27 seats in the Bundestag (the lower house of the German parliament). It was big news in the US because the party consisted of young people wearing multicolored clothing who were such a contrast to the career politicians who were over 50 and who wore the usual suits and ties. These people were strongly against the nuclear arms race.

The Greens built their party on four pillars: social justice, ecological wisdom, grassroots democracy, and nonviolence. The Greens were also heavily into the legalization of cannabis, reproductive rights, and LGBTQ rights.

One of the Green Party co-founders, Petra Kelly, became a rising political star with her charisma and her fluency in English (which she honed when she lived in the United States as a teenager after her mother married a US Army officer and the family moved to Georgia then Virginia). Unlike so many other peace activists of that era who tended to overlook abuses by the USSR and its allies, Petra Kelly had also denounced the Soviet totalitarian system and East Germany's treatment of peace activists. At one point she met with East German leader Erich Honecker demanding the release of all political prisoners who were involved in the East German peace movement while asking him why he repressed the same thing in his own country that he supported in the West.

Here is an interview she gave on British television in 1982.

I was a student of the University of Maryland in College Park at the time and I thought that it was amazing to see a movement sprung up consisting of people just a few years older than me who were trying to stand up to Ronald Reagan's anti-communist obsession (it was also around the same time that the US began to fund the death squads in El Salvador and the contras in Nicaragua). My boyfriend, who later became my ex-husband, also expressed interest in the Greens as well. I lived in off-campus housing during my senior year and my boyfriend used to spend the night at my place once a week. It was the morning after one of those overnight stays when my boyfriend and I watched Petra Kelly being interviewed on Meet the Press and we were both totally impressed with her. I found myself wishing that there was a similar movement here in the US.

Unexpected Surprises

My boyfriend decided to do some research, which wasn't easy because the Internet as we know it today didn't exist back then. Such research involved looking through phone books, making phone calls, and writing letters while hoping that someone writes back. My boyfriend also did this without telling me until after he found an answer. (I guess he wanted to surprise me. I certainly didn't tell him to do this. I still remember after he told me what he did he said that he did it because he felt that it was important for me to find a political identity.)

My boyfriend told me that he voted for Barry Commoner for president on the Citizens Party ticket back in 1980. I don't know how he did his research but he somehow learned that the Citizens Party had declared itself as a US branch of the West German Green Party. He even learned that there was a local activist named Bob Auerbach who lived in a town near the University of Maryland campus who was eager to recruit more people into the fledging Citizens Party/Greens movement.

So he made an appointment for the two of us to meet Bob. I was excited. I knew that the West German Greens consisted of mostly people who were somewhere between the ages of 25-40. These were people who were only a few years older than I was. I thought it would be cool to meet someone who was probably at least 25 who wanted to build a similar movement in the US. After all it was young people who led the 1960s antiwar marches against US involvement in Vietnam so I thought that it was only logical that young people would lead the way towards building a Green movement in the United States.

So we arrived at the townhouse where Bob lived while I was expecting to meet someone who was somewhere between the ages of 25-35. When Bob answered the door I was in for the shock of my life. Bob was around 64 or 65 at the time and he was older than both of my parents. Heck, he could've been old enough to be my grandfather.

Here's a reason why I was so shocked. I grew up living with a grandmother who didn't care about politics or or causes or getting involved with the local community (not even through the Catholic Church we attended when I was a child). She was content just to stay home most of the time then go to the local shopping mall with my mother and I on Saturdays and to Mass on Sundays. My mother used to tell me that old people tend not to bother with things like politics or social/community activities once they reached a certain age and here was a guy who totally contradicted what my mother used to tell me when I was growing up.

My boyfriend seemed less shocked about finding out that Bob was way older than the typical Green activist in West Germany.

Bob Auerbach told us that he had been an activist going as far back as the 1930s when he was involved in the local chapter of the War Resisters League as a teenager and he kept on being involved in a variety of peace and justice causes over the years. He seemed very enthusiastic about wanting to spread the growth of the Green movement in the United States and he was eager to get others to help him. He also showed us flyers he received from the Citizens Party’s national office in Washington, DC and Green Party buttons, some of which were in English and others were in German.

Bob suggested that we attend this upcoming Citizens Party/Greens event that was being held at this home that was located near Annapolis. (He wasn't able to attend himself due to a scheduling conflict with one of the many other organizations that he was involved in.) Former US Attorney General Ramsey Clark was going to be there as well. I thought that maybe I'll get a chance to meet more people who are closer in age to me and I'll get a chance to meet someone in real life whose name I've heard on the news every now and then.

When we arrived my hopes were dashed. The home near Annapolis was this very upscale home that was located in what looked like a wealthy neighborhood. When we walked in we saw people wearing their finest clothes and jewelry while we were dressed in the usual college attire of blue jeans and t-shirts. We looked like the stereotypical broke college students in a wealthy person's home with other upperclass people. We were also the youngest people there. It looked like the average age of the attendees were around 40 or 45 with many of them even older.

Basically we all just stood around speaking in hushed tones as we ate and drank the provided refreshments. At times Ramsey Clark would suddenly start speaking and people would suddenly stop what they were doing, gather around him, and listen to him speak. I don't remember what he exactly said (other than his opinions about the current politics of the time) but I remember people gathering around him and hanging on his every word. It was among the weirdest things I've ever witnessed in my life. My boyfriend and I left that gathering without making any new friends or contacts.

Having Ramsey Clark in attendance at a Citizens Party/Greens event became a premonition for what was going to happen to the Green Party in the US years later. Until his death in 2021 Ramsey Clark would go on to defend a number of authoritarian leaders like Saddam Hussein, Charles Taylor, Radovan Karadžić, Slobodan Milošević, Elizaphan Ntakirutimana, Muammar Qaddafi, Manuel Noriega, and Bashar al-Assad. If Ramsey Clark was alive today, he probably would have defended Vladimir Putin and he would’ve been okay with Russia being involved with the Green Party.

Bob Auerbach suggested that we try to start a campus group for the Citizens Party. My boyfriend and I were active in the Progressive Student Alliance (PSA) and we originally met each other through that group. It made sense for us to try to set up something with them. The PSA took the same stand on the issues as the Greens so I thought they would want to embrace the idea. Unfortunately none of them even cared about the Greens or the Citizens Party. That year the Rev. Jesse Jackson had decided to run in the 1984 Democratic primary so many PSA members preferred Jesse Jackson to the Citizens Party. They just didn't want to bother with doing anything with the Citizens Party.

So my boyfriend and I attempted to put on the event without the PSA. It was through Bob Auerbach that we spoke at times via phone with someone from the Citizens Party's DC office and the man I spoke through tried to be helpful in providing tips on how to organize a new group. The hardest part was that we got bogged down with University bureaucracy in even trying to sign up for a room because the Citizens Party weren't an on-campus group (despite the fact that we were trying to form a new on-campus group). I managed to snag a small room so we held our event but I remember it was very poorly attended (I think we got no more than five people) despite every effort to publicize the event through putting up flyers on the bulletin boards all over campus.

There were times when Bob Auerbach thought that we weren't doing enough work on behalf of the Citizens Party. I still remember that one phone call he made to me where he chastised me for my boyfriend and I not devoting more time to the Citizens Party. There was a reason why we couldn't devote more time: I was a full-time undergraduate student who was in my senior year and my parents had made it clear to me that they would only pay for four years of college so I had to finish on time if I wanted to get a degree. If the Citizens Party had paid me a regular salary, I would've switched to being a part-time student so I could afford devote more time to the cause and finish my bachelor's degree on a slower schedule. But they didn't. My boyfriend was a part-time graduate student who worked full-time at NASA so he didn't have as much time to devote to the Citizens Party as he would have wanted either.

A Last Gasp for the Citizens Party

By the summer of 1984 I managed to finish my bachelor's degree and I was looking for my first post-college job. The election was coming in November. Ronald Reagan was running for reelection and former Vice President Walter Mondale was running on the Democrat side. The Citizens Party decided to run a woman for president named Sonia Johnson, who was a housewife who became famous for being excommunicated from the Mormon church for her support of adding the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution.

Bob Auerbach had an idea of getting a booth for the Greenbelt Labor Day Festival with the idea of promoting the Citizens Party and Sonia Johnson's candidacy. My boyfriend and I decided to help Bob out with staffing the booth. (He also roped a few other people he knew from the various peace and justice groups that he was also involved with to help out with the booth as well.) It was the first time I had ever attended that festival and it was the first time I had staffed a booth outside of campus. We didn't get much attention for our booth other than the one evening when a fundamentalist Christian woman asked us if we were connected with the National Man-Boy Love Association whose catchphrase was “Sex before eight or it's too late.” We assured her that we weren't but when she mentioned God and Jesus out of the blue, a man who was also at the booth peruing our flyers suddenly perked up and mentioned that he is an atheist and that God does not exist. An argument broke out between the two and they were arguing so vehemently that they kept other people away from the booth.

After the November 1984 election, in which Ronald Reagan won reelection by a major landslide, Bob Auerbach suggested that my boyfriend and I try to get on the local city council. He said that the Citizens Party was going to have people start getting elected or appointed to lower offices like city councils and school boards as a way of building the party from the ground up. It sounded like a great idea because the right wing had been doing something similar since the 1970s and they were just starting to become a formidable force by the 1980s. Nothing came of it because the Citizens Party abruptly closed its DC office after the 1984 election and nothing further was ever heard from them.

Basically my boyfriend and I got married, moved on from the Citizens Party, did other things and got divorced.

We continued to see Bob Auerbach every now and then but we didn't work on any more political causes with him. Bob Auerbach remained a true believer in the Greens. In fact he had even attempted to run as a Green member of the US House of Representatives against the incumbent Steny Hoyer a few times, while losing each time. He made his last run for public office against Hoyer in 2012 at the age of 92. Had he won, he would’ve been the oldest person ever elected to the US House of Representatives. (He didn't win.) Here's a picture I shot of Bob Auerbach marching in the annual Greenbelt Labor Day Parade in 2012.

Bob is the one with a white beard and he is wearing a green shirt and a wide-brimmed hat. Marching with him in the photo were Bob's ex-wife, Mary Carson (who was in a wheelchair), assorted family members, and a few friends. Most of them were holding homemade signs urging people to vote for Bob.

Three months later Bob was trying to cross a street on his way to the post office when he was struck by a speeding driver and killed just two days before what would've been his 93rd birthday.

Three years later a new Greenbelt Peace Memorial was unveiled and Bob Auerbach was one of four people who were honored. I made this video about the Greenbelt Peace Memorial about a year ago, which includes footage about Bob Auerbach.

The Citizens Party may had become defunct but the Greens in the United States would try to make a comeback with each attempt being worse than the previous one.

As for Petra Kelly, in later years she became increasingly estranged from the German Green Party because she had opposed any alliance with a traditional political party while her colleagues disagreed with her purist stance. At the age of 44 she met a very bad end as part of a murder-suicide in 1992 when her partner shot her in bed while she was sleeping then turned the gun on himself.

The German Green Party managed to outlive Petra Kelly and today it's a thriving political party. The Green Party has also expanded to and thrived in other countries like New Zealand, Australia, Lebanon, Taiwan, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Ireland, Sweden, Finland, Latvia, Brazil, and Canada. There is even a continental European Green Party that is dedicated to spreading the Green values to smaller European countries like Montenegro.

As you shall see, the same can't be said for the Green Party in the United States.

The Green Party Under Ralph Nader

After the end of the Citizens Party some activists who believed in the Greens decided to form a new Greens movement and they spent much of the 1980s and 1990s organizing and building a new political party.

I remember some of my old college friends were talking about how they loved the Green Party, which was pretty ironic because years earlier I couldn’t get them to even consider organizing a campus group on behalf of the Citizens Party because so many of them were staunch Jesse Jackson supporters. I have to admit that my experiences with organizing on behalf of the Citizens Party/Greens had left me so frustrated that I pretty much ignored my friends’ suggestion that I change my party affiliation on my voter registration card from Democrat to Green (which is permissible under Maryland voter laws).

The Greens made a splash in 1996 when they managed to get consumer advocate Ralph Nader to run for president. The Green Party got some attention because of Nader’s fame but he received only 0.7% of the vote.

It was Ralph Nader’s second run for president under the Green Party in 2000 that not only gained a lot more attention but it also became controversial. That year Vice President Al Gore was running on the Democrat ticket. He had to deal with blowback from the media and Republicans because Al Gore had served under Bill Clinton, who was impeached for lying about his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. While Gore had nothing to do with that incident, the adversaries harassed him about this as a way to get voters to connect what Clinton did with Gore. George W. Bush, the former Texas governor and the son of ex-President George H.W. Bush was running on the Republican side and he had huge support from the right-wing Christian evangelicals.

Ralph Nader’s run had inspired people who would have otherwise supported Al Gore to support Nader instead. This resulted in polling that showed that the race between Gore and Bush was very close.

There was a movement between the Greens and certain progressive Democrats to do a vote swapping known as Nader’s Traders. These people knew that the chances of Ralph Nader actually being elected president were low but they also knew that if the Greens could get at least 5% of the votes on Election Day, they would qualify for government grants that they could use to build the Greens into a mainstream political party. The idea went like this, a registered Democrat in a safe state that Gore is projected to win would be paired with a Green voter in a swing state where the election could go either way between Bush or Gore. The Democrat in a safe state would vote for Ralph Nader so the Greens would get the 5% of the votes needed in order to qualify for the government grants. In exchange, the Green in a swing state would vote for Al Gore so George W. Bush would be kept away from the White House. It was an ingenious idea that would've been a win-win for Democrats, Greens, and the United States as a whole.

I had seriously considered taking part in this. I lived (and still live) in Maryland, which has long been a stronghold of the Democratic Party. I would’ve had no problem with being paired with a voter in Florida or Wisconsin where I would vote for Nader while my Green counterpart would vote for Gore.

The reason why this never happened is because when Ralph Nader learned about this effort, he rejected this vote swapping idea while stating bluntly that he could care less about who wins. What was worse was that Nader spent his final weeks campaigning in states where a strong showing by the Greens would hurt Gore the most. He stated that his aim was to destroy the Democratic Party altogether then replace it.

He also alienated people within the Green Party as well. Many women, people of color, and LGBTQ activists felt marginalized when Nader openly refused to embrace their issues. One such example was when a reporter asked Nader about where he stood on gay rights and he responded that he would not become involved in what he termed “gonadal politics.”

This led to the Election Day result where Al Gore lost to George W. Bush by only 537 votes in Florida. Ralph Nader received 97,421 votes in Florida. It has been widely believed that Nader siphoned votes that would have otherwise gone to Gore. To this day Nader is still blamed for the outcome of that election. Had Nader permitted the Nader’s Traders to operate, it’s very likely that Al Gore would have received more votes in Florida, which would’ve made him the next president.

Nader and the Green Party parted ways after 2000. In 2004 David Cobb ran for president and Cynthia McKinney ran for president in 2008. They both got 0.1% of the vote.

The Green Party Under Jill Stein

Ralph Nader may have damaged the reputation of the Green Party but it was under Jill Stein that the US Green Party is now considered to be connected to Vladimir Putin and Russia. Jill Stein first ran for president under the Greens in 2012 but she got 0.4% of the vote.

It was with the 2016 election that she not only gained more attention but it was said that Russia, through the use of its internet troll farms, were responsible for Stein’s increase in visibility. The reason why Russia was so eager to help Jill Stein was because she would’ve been the spoiler candidate who would siphon enough votes that would have otherwise gone to Hillary Clinton to ensure that Donald Trump would win the election.

The Jill Stein-Vladimir Putin connection became even more apparent when this photo surfaced showing Stein at a dinner in Moscow that was held in 2015 to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the launching of the Russian TV network RT. She was seated at the same table as Vladimir Putin and Ret. Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, who was then-advising the Trump campaign and who would later become Donald Trump’s national security adviser. (Flynn is also rumored to be the Q who’s behind the QAnon movement.)

While she was in Moscow she also recorded a video in Red Square where she talked about “the need to rein in American exceptionalism” and replace “a U.S. policy based on domination”—words that sounded like they were ripped from Putin’s talking points.

The 2016 election resulted in a win for Donald Trump while Jill Stein received 1.1% of the vote. After the election, Jill Stein decided to act like a hero for democracy by requesting a recount of the votes in just three states—all of which were battleground states. She said that she wanted to create fair elections and not help Hillary Clinton. She managed to raise $7.3 million in donations for this effort.

The recount ended in December, 2016 after a court in Pennsylvania denied Stein’s request for a recount, a court in Michigan denied Stein’s appeal to keep the recount going, and Wisconsin had only uncovered 131 uncounted votes—all of which were for Trump.

Stein made filings to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) about those donations for the recount until September 2017. The latest on the funds came from an online post made by Stein’s campaign on April 20, 2018, which said that the funds were down to $932,178. The opacity surrounding how the money was spent, especially the money that was spent after the recount was terminated, led to criticism that Jill Stein was more interested in boosting her political operations than in recounting votes. It also led to the FEC warning the campaign that they were in danger of violating federal law for not filing reports more often.

After the 2016 election Stein pretty much slinked away from politics for the next few years. In 2020 Howie Hawkins ran for president as a Green but he only received 0.3% of the vote.

But now in 2024 Jill Stein has come back and is running for president as a Green once again. She is even more blatant about being little more than a puppet for Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump as she parrots Russian and MAGA talking points in her campaign. She rarely says anything critical about Donald Trump but she's always eager to bash Kamala Harris and the Democrats. Both Russia and the MAGA movement are using Stein as an election spoiler in order to help Donald Trump.

Let's take the issue of the Russian invasion of Ukraine for example. She said that the invasion was a response to the plans of the US empire and NATO to place nuclear weapons on Russia's borders.

In contrast, the Greens in Germany have not only condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine but it has moved away from its pacifist roots to support arming Ukraine.

The Bottom Line

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was correct when she said that the US Green Party only emerges once every four years to run a candidate for president then disappears after the election for the next four years. This screenshot from the Wikipedia shows the number of Green politicians who are currently serving in office on the federal, state, and territorial levels—zero.

Had its predecessor, the Citizens Party, actually gone through with its idea of running candidates during the off-year midterm elections for lower offices (such as a seat on the council of a small town) back in the mid to late 1980s, it's very possible that the Greens would be taken more seriously as a political party today. It's also possible that there might be some Greens serving in the US House of Representatives and/or the Senate. It might have even been possible that history would be made this year with the first Green politician ever elected as president.

I still remember the years when the late Bob Auerbach ran against Steny Hoyer for his seat in the US House of Representatives on the Green Party ticket. Not once have I ever recalled the national Green Party mentioning something like, “We also have down-ballot candidates like Bob Auerbach who's running for the US House of Representatives in Maryland.” I don't even know if Bob actually received any kind of support from the national Green Party in the way that Democrats and Republicans support their down-ballot candidates. Based on the fact that the national Green Party was silent on the times that Bob ran, I'd have to conclude that he received little to no support.

In order to have a real political party, you need to have members of your party serving in lower offices. That is how you build a movement. Movement building is a major cornerstone to building anything new, whether it's a social movement or a political party. A big example of building a movement is the group that I'm currently involved with, the Poor People's Campaign. It is a non-partisan interfaith-based movement that is trying to reform the political and social system to better meet the needs of the poor and low-income voters. For years we have been organizing people on the state and local levels to help them strike back at any potential injustice, whether it's excess enviromental degradation in a local area or a proposed new legislation that could negatively impact poor and low-income people. This year we are focusing on registering new voters from the poor and low-income voters so the politicians will at long last see the lower classes as a force to be reckoned with and to hopefully start paying attention to their needs. Unlike the US Green Party, the Poor People's Campaign has no connection of any kind with Russia or Vladimir Putin or any other authoritarian countries or leaders.

At this point the Green Party in the US is so close to Russia that I no longer think that it's a serious or viable political party. Reforming it is no longer an option because of its tarnished reputation thanks to Ralph Nader and Jill Stein. I think that there should be a new political party formed that is progressive and takes the same stands on the issues as the US Greens with one major exception—a policy of never accepting any kind of help or support from foreign authoritarian governments.

A vote for Jill Stein in 2024 is a vote for Donald Trump because she could siphon off just enough votes away from Kamala Harris to ensure that Trump will win reelection. A vote for Jill Stein is also a vote for Vladimir Putin given her connections to the Kremlin.

I started this post with a video so I'll end it with another video, this one from an Arab American who is urging people to stop paying attention to Jill Stein while deflating Stein’s claim that she's the only anti-war and anti-genocide candidate who's running for president. (One example is Jill Stein also likes Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad just as much as she likes Putin.)

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