Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently made headlines for calling perennial Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein “predatory” and “not serious.” AOC is right.

Giving voters more choices is a good thing for democracy. But third-party politics isn’t performance art. It’s hard work — which Stein is not doing. As AOC observed: “[When] all you do is show up once every four years to speak to people who are justifiably pissed off, but you’re just showing up once every four years to do that, you’re not serious.”

To be clear: AOC was not critiquing third parties as a whole, or the idea that we need more choices in our democracy. In fact, AOC specifically cited the Working Families Party as an example of an effective third party. The organization I lead, MoveOn, supports their 365-day-a-year efforts to build power for a pro-voter, multi-party system. And I understand third parties’ power to activate voters hungry for alternatives: I myself volunteered for Ralph Nader in 2000, and that experience helped shape my lifelong commitment to people-first politics.


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  • Skeezix
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    133 months ago

    This is the modus operandi of conservatives, libertarians, and anyone trying to put forward a disingenuous argument

    • @anticolonialist
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      -173 months ago

      That’s cute, That your binary thinking assumes a ballot critique of one thing is automatically support of the other.

        • ArxCyberwolf
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          103 months ago

          They won’t. They already ignored multiple requests for an explanation or evidence. anticolonialist doesn’t discuss in good faith and this isn’t anything new.

        • @anticolonialist
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          -53 months ago

          Because the people that are not serious are people like AOC, the ones that ran on populist platforms to get elected. And then once they got into office, they completely abandoned everything they ran on.

            • @anticolonialist
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              -33 months ago

              When the duopoly has convinced you that you have two options, they’re going to vote for the red fascist or the blue fascist. That 82.2% of the vote that voted for her belonged to the blue fascists.