The European Parliamentary Elections were supposed to be about the collapse of the center to the emerging far right populist parties. While this happened in some countries (LePen outpolling Macron in France, the Brexit Party beating the Tories and Labour in the UK) the bigger takeaway is the Green Surge of voters concerned about climate change.
In an election for the European Parliament in which far-right, anti-immigration buccaneers also gained modestly to post their best-ever result, the good showing for the Greens may have the bigger impact on policy.
The Green Party surged to its best finish in European parliamentary elections across the board, alongside other liberal parties concerned about climate. Unlike their American counterparts, the European Greens are pragmatic partners to traditional centrist parties who will now be an essential part of a pro-EU governing coalition.
The center-left and center-right parties that long jointly ruled the parliament have lost their majority, meaning they will need to depend on Greens…to advance their agenda.
So what are the takeaways for American politics?
Green is good. Green voters are the new purple or swing voters. Even in the United States. Supermajorities of Democrats and independents listed climate change as their top issue after health care. The Green New Deal is popular across the board-even with Trump voters. It is even more popular than Medicare for All.
Want to motivate millennials and other young voters to come to the polls? Be Green
The results propelled the Greens into second place in Germany and third place in France and elsewhere, amid a surge in excitement from young voters who faulted old-school parties for ignoring their concerns about the environment and offering few alternatives for a generation beset by economic pain following the global financial crisis.
What is the future of the left? It is green, not red. Focused on making a 21st century economy that is more just for workers and more just for the planet.
“The Greens represent the only project of the future,” French Greens leader Yannick Jadot said Monday on French television.
Climate change, said an editorial in France’s Liberation newspaper, “has become the principal criteria of judging political action in the European Union.”
It can be the principal criteria for our politics too. A transpartisan issue that brings together the left wing base, Jill Stein defectors, moderate suburbanites, midwestern frarmers, and populist independents. We just need candidates willing to run on this vision.
The notion that green voters are swing voters — swinging between showing up and staying home — is an intriguing one with some considerable background. The notion that they are in fact non-partisan or equivalent to “purple” is *really* intriguing. I’m not sure it makes logical sense but sometimes these things don’t.
Nathaniel Stinnett, an old-hand MA activist doubtless known to many on this site, started the Environmental Voter Project with exactly this in mind — to get non-voting enviros into the booths. Unfortunately, there are many non-voting green folks. I find that unimaginable, but there we are. I imagine it’s a byproduct of a mentality that emphasizes personal virtue (personal carbon footprint, no plastic straws) over collective action to change systems en masse.
David Roberts (as I usually do) that “This one weird trick can help any state or city pass clean energy policy” — the trick being elect Democrats. Now, as we know here in MA, that is a necessary-not-sufficient condition. The sloth and inertia of the D party can be as much of a turn-off as the outright viciousness of the R’s. In the climate battle, mediocre D’s will be our downfall, too — witness that under pro-fracking President Obama, methane emissions spiked in the US.
I’m brewing a post on the AFL-CIO being cool to the Green New Deal, and how I’m quite sure that’s a mistake on their part, for many reasons.
Senator Markey’s co-sponsorship of the Green New Deal is the major reason green voters should and do support him for re-election in 2020.
The twenty-something enviros that I meet through my children don’t vote because they assert that voting makes them participants in and therefore collaborators with a corrupt system that is itself evil. They often spend their day in doing “meaningful” work — as nearly as I can tell, “meaningful” in that context is a synonym for “unpaid”.
The behavior of our government at all levels makes it very difficult to effectively dispute this misguided view of the world. It also isn’t helpful to remind them that we elders invariably end up funding all this. The city of Northampton is utterly corrupt in its handling of parking meters and traffic tickets. The Massachusetts legislature is utterly corrupt in its handling of just about everything it does. The federal government is completely paralyzed at a time when critical decisions MUST be made and ACTED ON. It is very hard to find examples to offer these twenty-something enviros that do anything except confirm their cynicism.
It is perhaps not surprising that this same generation increasingly argues that America “can’t afford” to meet its Social Security and Medicare obligations to we baby-boomers who have supported them for the past thirty years and still support many of them now.
I hate to sound bitter, but the deep divisions that we see playing out today go well beyond Republican vs Democrat. We American elders completely betrayed humanity by steadfastly refusing to do anything AT ALL about climate change. America as conquering victor proudly announced to the world our commitment to morality and ethics in the Nuremberg trials in the immediate aftermath of WWII — we betrayed all that a few decades later when those same standards were inconvenient for our political purposes.
A generation of elected officials did their best to do the right thing in the Watergate era when a popular President was indisputably corrupt. Today’s generation of elected officials:
1. Impeached (but did not convict) a popular president for lying about consensual oral sex
2. Ignored compelling evidence of war crimes ordered by the US government in 2003
3. Spent decades pro-actively worsening global warming in the face of consistent and compelling science telling us what we were doing to ourselves and the planet.
4. Bend over backwards to do absolutely nothing (except whine) about compelling evidence of pervasive treason, corruption, bribery, criminality, and nepotism in an entire administration.
Here is the issue with ANY appeal to morality and ethics: it is hypocritical and empty when not lived ourselves.
People need to be made aware that politics is meaningful in their daily lives. Connecting climate policy to the day to day lived reality of ordinary people is how we won on healthcare and it is how we can win on climate.
We MUST force the mainstream media to connect the climate change dots, especially since the government is feverishly striving to erase as many lines as possible.
We’ve had twelve straight days of tornado warnings:
Buried in pieces like this, we see (emphasis mine):
This needs to be translated to plain language, and even better — images.
THIS is what climate change looks like:
Tornado damage in Kansas
We are seeing historic flooding.
THIS is what climate change looks like:
Historic flooding in Davenport, Iowa
Sorry, no sympathy. Meaningful change is derived from public policy which is made by officials who are chosen by election. If they don’t vote they are just begging to be ignored.
I enthusiastically agree.
The rub, in the context of this thread, is that these people for whom we rightly have no sympathy are our best shot at removing the Trumpists — but only if we can somehow get these people to vote.
I think one thing we can all agree on is that a top priority of the next Democratic president and Democratic trifecta is making it easier to vote. Same day voter registration across the board, an election day holiday, and removing state level constraints on voting.
I would tread very carefully with this line of argument. There are a lot of people of color who feel ignored by the Democratic Party and I would strongly disagree with the notion that they deserve to be ignored or deserve this toxic government. The data show that its the fault of the political class failing to engage them.
A big reason AOC and AP won their primaries is by activating voters who typically do not show up to vote in primaries. Activating non-habitual voters was a big key to the 2018 midterm victory and closing the gap with Republicans. Inner city Detroit, Philly, Pittsburgh, and Milwaukee are just as electorally essential as the suburbs.
The level of civic disengagement is frightening and I would argue it goes both ways. When your day to day life is about existential survival it becomes a lot harder to think about civic minded obligations like voting. Very few of my students working class parents can make it to parent teacher conferences, even though we hold them later and later, since everyone is juggling multiple jobs just to pay the rent. People in that state are a lot less likely to vote than middle class suburban whites, and its the job of our party to engage these communities.
Especially when election day is on a work day and a school day and not every employer or day care is as obliging. I as a middle class childless white male nearly left the polling center during the 2014 election where I had to shove voting into my 90 minute morning commute and the machines didn’t work and the line was backed up and my boss was riding my ass about showing up on time. I cannot imagine how frustrating that experience would be to a single mom or person of color who might not have the faith I had that the machines would eventually be fixed and my vote would eventually count.
I agree with all of the above, and would add that they are also swing voters in the traditional sense from R to D. The IL-6 was a staunchly Goldwater conservative district once represented by arch conservative Henry Hyde, and is now represented by a green job creator Sean Casten. The district is unique in that it is home to two major government labs and has a lot of scientists, but these traditionally fiscally conservative socially moderate voters are now also concerned about climate. I think we will see a lot of suburban moderates swayed by this issue across the country. When properly framed around protecting property and creating jobs-its a winner.