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11/3/2024 Beyond Protest Votes: Can Jill Stein and the Green Party Push America Toward Revolutionary Change? By: Jonathan BrownRead Now As the 2024 presidential election campaign heats up, one thing is for certain: there is a widespread lack of enthusiasm for either of the major party candidates. This is hardly surprising. The 2024 election is occurring during a moment of unprecedented crisis for the U.S. political establishment. There is widespread distrust in public institutions, a deeply unpopular incumbent president who is carrying out a genocide in Gaza, a failing economy, and a world on the brink of nuclear war. One of the two major presidential candidates is a former “top cop” who was anointed to the Democratic Party presidential nomination through a backroom deal that bypassed the will of the voters. The other major party candidate is a corrupt real estate mogul and reality TV con man with multiple felony convictions. Both candidates have received hundreds of millions of dollars from wealthy oligarchs; both have promised that, if elected, they will continue the status quo of endless war and corporate tyranny. Is it any wonder, then, that many disillusioned voters are looking to third party candidates as an alternative to the two mainstream parties? Perhaps the most prominent third party campaign on the ballot this year is Green Party candidate, Jill Stein. The Green Party is a self-described “eco-socialist” party that “opposes capitalism” and runs on a campaign platform of “people, planet, peace.” In numerous speeches and interviews, Stein has railed against the evils of the two-party system, denounced the “war machine,” and called for a populist message of getting Big Money out of politics. Such positions make Stein’s campaign an increasingly popular choice among disgruntled voters, but perhaps the issue that most stands out is her steadfast opposition to Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza. With many potential Democratic voters outraged over the Biden/Harris administration’s complicity in Israel’s war crimes, Stein seems poised to make inroads among voters who otherwise would be in the Harris camp. In fact, recent polling has suggested that Stein leads Harris among Muslim voters in key swing states, much to the dismay of parisian Democrats. But is Jill Stein and the Green Party a viable alternative to the two-party system? Or is she merely “controlled opposition” – a spoiler running a vanity campaign for protest votes that does not really challenge the power of monopoly-capitalism? This is a critical question for Marxist-Leninsts to ask ourselves this election. Can the Green Party be a viable path to achieving revolutionary change in America? Or are the Greens merely a pressure group oriented towards the Democratic Party? Perhaps one way we can answer these questions is by examining how the Democratic Party has reacted to Jill Stein’s candidacy, and how, in turn, Stein herself has responded to the Democrats. It can be observed that the Democratic Party has a long record of hostility against the Green Party in general, and Jill Stein in particular. The Democrats blame Ralph Nader for costing Al Gore the 2000 election, and Stein for the 2016 defeat of Hillary Clinton. Of course, the Democrats do not wish to compete against the Greens in a fair and open election. Instead, they believe they are entitled to win votes, simply because they are not Trump. So instead of viewing the challenge of a third party campaign as an opportunity to self-reflect and improve their policies, the Democrats have instead opted to rely on dirty tricks to stifle Green Party’s chances at winning, leading to the Democratic Party operatives and their puppets in the corporate media to launch a barrage of attacks on the Stein campaign. One tactic has been to employ the fraudulent “democratic-socialist” congresswoman and establishment shill, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to smear Jill Stein as running a “predatory” campaign to steal votes from the Democrats. Another strategy has been to simply kick the Green Party off the ballot. Despite claiming that “democracy is on the ballot” in 2024, the so-called “Democratic” Party has no qualms about employing an array of anti-democratic maneuvers to remove the Green Party candidate from the ballots in key swing states. But perhaps the most odious strategy the Democratic Party has employed thus far is its use of red-baiting techniques straight out of the Cold War to smear Jill Stein as an agent of Russia and a lackey of Vladimir Putin. It was not that long ago that Democrats mocked Cold War rhetoric as outdated. In 2012, for example, then-President Obama lambasted Republican challenger Mitt Romney’s fear-mongering over Russia by declaring, “the 1980s are now calling to ask for their foreign policy back. The Cold War has been over for 20 years.” But things changed drastically in 2014, when the U.S. government orchestrated a coup in the Ukraine to install a puppet regime that would facilitate the expansion of NATO onto Russia’s borders. Since that time, the Democratic Party has leaned heavily into an aggressive militarism against Russia, both to destabilize Russia’s growing geopolitical influence and to facilitate Western control over Russia’s considerable natural gas reserves. The long-term goal, as President Joe Biden has acknowledged, is to use Ukraine as a proxy to carry out a regime-change war against Putin, leading to the disintegration of the Russian Federation into a multitude of smaller states. Around the same time that the U.S. Empire was plotting to destabilize Russia, it began covertly arming Islamic extremist groups in Syria for the purpose of overthrowing Syrian president Bashar al-Assad aimed at securing control over Syria’s oil pipelines. Assad resisted the US attempt at overthrowing his government and was supported by Russia in an effort to prevent the U.S. military from doing to Syria what it had previously done to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. All of this set the stage for the Democratic Party to position itself as a neoconservative war party that is committed to permanent military expansion abroad and an aggressive campaign of Cold War McCarthyite hysteria at home. The lynchpin of this campaign is the use of false allegations of malign Russian influence to silence any political opposition. After losing the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton promoted a conspiratorial campaign known as “Russiagate” to scapegoat Russia for her electoral defeat, peddling the falsehood that Trump was installed to power via Russian interference in the election. This is ironic, given that it was actually Bill Clinton who meddled in Russia’s 1996 election to help Boris Yeltsin defeat the Communist Party candidate. Hillary Clinton’s red-baiting campaign had the dual effect of both sewing doubt in the legitimacy of the electoral process, while also becoming a convenient tool for the Democrats to use for smearing all opposition parties as Russian agents. This McCarthyite campaign of red-baiting has been successfully employed not only against Donald Trump, but also left-wing opposition to the Democrats. During the 2020 Democratic Party primary campaign, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders was targeted by a Russiagate smear campaign. In response, Sanders fell in line behind the Democrats’ McCarthyite narrative, engaging in some red-baiting of his own by accusing Trump of being “good friends” with Vladimir Putin. Sanders continued his pattern of hostility towards Russia in 2022, when he called for sanctions and voted to send billions of dollars in armaments to Ukraine. After 2016, Jill Stein became a primary target of Russiagate allegations. Stein’s frequent appearances on the Russian news station RT were subjected to scrutiny. A 2015 gala dinner in Moscow became a particular point of controversy, where Stein was photographed sitting across from Vlladimir Putin. She was also photographed meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in New York. Then, a report by the Senate Intelligence Committee claimed that “Russian troll farms” were using social media to encourage minority groups to vote for the Green Party in the 2016 election. “Is Stein a fellow traveler or a useful idiot?” asked an NBC News editorial, in typical McCarthyite language. The red-baiting amped up even further during Stein’s 2024 election campaign. When Stein made an appearance on the popular radio talk show The Breakfast Club in September, she was grilled by the Democratic Party-aligned hosts with renewed allegations of Russian collusion. Then, former MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan demanded Stein denounce Putin as a war criminal in a highly contentious interview. Hasan repeatedly badgered Stein, talking over her and demanding that she declare Putin a “war criminal.” Unfortunately, Stein’s performance in the interview came across as weak, muddled, and defensive. She refused to outright answer Hasan’s questions, and failed to push back against his flawed line of reasoning. She argued that Putin was a war criminal “in so many words” and that Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine was a “criminal and murderous war.” However, she implied that her reluctance to label Putin an outright “war criminal” was not rooted in any sort of solidarity with Russia, but rather a mere desire to give the U.S. a stronger negotiating position against Putin. Humiliated by the interview, Stein released an official statement to clarify her position on Russia. In this statement, Stein unequivocally condemned both Putin and Assad as “war criminals responsible for immense suffering and devastation.” She equated Russia’s support for Assad with the U.S. invasion of Iraq and bizarrely accused Russia of being an “imperialist power.” She went on to rattle off a long list of U.S. and Israeli leaders – including Kamala Harris and Donald Trump – that she defined as “war criminals.” It is important to note, however, that Stein’s statement did not condemn Vlladamir Zelensky – the corrupt NATO puppet in Ukraine – as a war criminal. Nor did she condemn the CIA for attempting to overthrow the Syrian government which prompted Russia to intervene in the first place. Stein’s statement is nothing more than a full-blown capitulation to the U.S. war machine. She is attempting to play both sides, employing a variation of the old Trotskyite slogan “neither Washington nor Moscow.” The problem with Stein’s “both sides are bad” approach should be obvious to any committed anti-imperialist. By condemning Putin and Assad as “war criminals,” Stein equates the countries that are resisting imperialism with countries that are engaging in imperialism. In other words, she is drawing a false equivalency between the victim and the aggressor. In doing so, she reveals the true colors of her campaign and of the Green Party itself. Far from being a revolutionary party – a legitimate alternative to the Two-Party System – the Green Party positions itself as “Democratic Party lite.” They claim to oppose the war machine while they reinforce the same Western imperialist narratives against Russia and Syria that the Democrats do. In doing so, Stein reveals that her commitment to anti-imperialism is rather thin. Although Stein has spoken positively about multipolarity, when Stein is pressured, she capitulates and falls into line behind the forces of U.S. imperialism. When push comes to shove, she condemns the countries that are building the new multipolar world that she claims to support. How can Stein claim to be against U.S. imperialism while opposing the countries that are on the front lines of the fight against imperialism? This inconsistency places Stein’s claim of being a viable alternative to the two-party duopoly in serious doubt. What the American working-class needs is not a protest vote for a wishy-washy candidate who wants to offer a kinder, gentler face of U.S. Empire. Instead, what we need is a strong and courageous party that will be the vanguard of the working-class – that will fight against U.S. imperialism and will stand in solidarity with the new emerging multipolar world, declaring openly its support for Russia’s self-defensive actions against NATO aggression, and for Syria’s self-defense against an attempted CIA-backed coup. If Stein and the Green Party cannot offer this minimal level of anti-imperialist commitment, then the true colors of the Green Party have been revealed. While Stein and the Greens should be applauded for their opposition to the two-party system, and anti-democratic measures to limit their ballot access must be condemned – we must accept that the Greens are not a viable alternative to the system. Supporting the Greens, then, is not a revolutionary strategy for achieving social change. The American Communist Party is the only force in U.S. politics that can mount a consistent challenge to U.S. imperialism and stand in solidarity with the rising multipolar world. Author Jonathan Brown is a historian and sociologist who serves on the Department of Education of the American Communist Party. He sits on the editorial board of Red America journal and is the editorial director of Southern Worker. Archives October 2025
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