“If Clinton is nominated and it comes to a choice between Clinton and Trump, in a swing state, a state where it’s going to matter which way you vote, I would vote against Trump, and by elementary arithmetic, that means you hold your nose and you vote Democrat. I don’t think there’s any other rational choice. Abstaining from voting or, say, voting for, say, a candidate you prefer, a minority candidate, just amounts to a vote for Donald Trump, which I think is a devastating prospect.”
-Noam Chomsky, on Democracy Now, May 16, 2016

I thought of what Chomsky said last month when I saw this morning an article from likely Green Party Presidential candidate Jill Stein. Here’s what she had to say as far as what people should do if Bernie doesn’t get the Democratic Party nomination:

“If Bernie is denied the nomination, don’t discount the potential for our Green campaign to carry the movement forward to become a major force in the election. If millennials in debt decide to get the word out, hold on to your hat for a voter revolt that could go a very long way, even perhaps to the White House. Here’s the bottom line. Democracy doesn’t need silence and fear. It needs voices and values, and a moral compass. We must be that moral compass. This is the time to stand up with the courage of our convictions, while we still can. The corporate candidates will not fix this for us. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

So Jill thinks that she has a chance of winning the White House. She seems to think that the mass movement that Bernie has built, or at least the young people within it, are now going to get behind her. And she expects this to happen even though there has been very little support of any kind from Jill or the national Green Party for Bernie, something I personally urged them to do in a column 11 months ago. A number of individual Green Party members, myself included, have been outspoken in support of and active within the campaign but not the national party or Jill. And now, a few days before the end of the Democratic primaries, she calls upon people to support Sanders.

Why have over 10 million people voted for democratic socialist Bernie Sanders over the last 5 months? It’s not just his ideas, and it’s not just because he has been outspoken and brave and urged his supporters to be the same. It’s also because he had credibility as someone repeatedly elected to office for the last three decades, including getting 71% of the vote in his US Senate re-election campaign in 2012. It’s because when he made his decision to go for the Presidency, he already had a very big list of hundreds of thousands of donors across the country built up over many years. And it’s because he had national visibility as a result of his work and votes in support of progressive issues in Congress over all that time.

I’m sorry, Jill, but you and the Green Party don’t have anything close to that track record and those resources. I say that as someone who has been an active member of the GP in New Jersey for 16 years, a GP US Senate candidate, a sometimes-GP-leader at various levels and as someone who supported you in 2012. Your positions on the issues are very good; indeed, I’d choose you over Bernie when it comes to your respective overall positions on the issues. And without question you are articulate and, yes, brave to have hung in there as you have all of these years, fighting the good fight.