Today is a good day to ask, what would be so bad with voting green? I think the only reason a lot of people placed their climate anxiety on hold was to join the swell that supplied a Democrat majority. Now one has to wonder if this was worth foregoing the green message.
Hearts are heavy across the so-called “progressive” spectrum because the Democratic party and president seem to have walked away from passing health care reform, their nerves shattered by the Republican win of Ted Kennedy’s old seat in Massachusetts.
Ezra Klein asked yesterday, Can Democrats govern? and response from commenters highlighted fears that the base of voting support would fracture, people would not vote, or vote green, as it this were a bad thing.
If the Democrats can’t use the majority that a number of different interests joined together to give them – if they can’t even pass desirable legislation at the national level – then what good are they to the environmental cause?
If partisan politics won’t work, then sustainability candidates are the only answer, regardless of where they come from.
The planet’s comfort zone for human civilization is running out, quickly. This forms its own messaging, no packaging required. This issue won’t go away, it will rise in damage and immediacy month by month, year after year, unremittingly, right up to endgame.
What is needed are people who can get things done. From their recent record it didn’t look as if it would be the Republicans solving our problems. And from the beginning it was always questionable if the Democrats were able to step into this requirement.
For the future of the Democrat label as a political identity, a little more loss of nerve such as we’re seeing at the moment and Democrats will be finished with progressive dialog, because the planet’s fate itself will soon take over that entire conversation.
Oddly, even as the Dems go down, Obama may rise, on this one front, the most important of all. And as Joe Romm shows today, many Republicans seem interested in saving the biosphere. There is indeed much bi-partisan support for climate legislation.
It’s time for those who care about the planet to throw away party affiliation, for those independent voters who joined the Democrats in hopes of getting change to focus instead on sustainability platforms, wherever they may be found. It’s time for sustainability to become the number one vote-getting plank in any representative’s platform.