It's not easy being Green

As the national Greens draw more attention than ever,
a radical wing threatens to split the movement

by Seth Gitell

DRIVE INTO DOWNTOWN Lawrence, and the first things you see are the massive old mills once powered by the Merrimack River -- remnants of the Industrial Revolution. But there's more to Lawrence than its past. Head along Essex Street in the heart of downtown and you'll see Dominican bakeries and women's clothing shops, signs of an immigrant-fueled urban renaissance. You'll also see, somewhat incongruously, the Bernstein Bookshop, where leftist posters and placards adorn the plate-glass windows. Here, a new revolution is struggling to emerge amid the remains of the old. The Bernstein doesn't just sell books: it also doubles as the unlikely national headquarters of the Green Party USA.

America's Greens are getting more attention this year than ever before in their 10-year history: when the Association of State Green Parties (ASGP) nominated Ralph Nader at its convention in Denver last month, the event was covered by every major national newspaper and by broadcast news outlets including CNN and MSNBC. Yet when the Lawrence-based Green Party USA (GPUSA) did the same the previous month in Chicago, it attracted less fanfare. That may be ironic. Although Nader is running on the platform of the ASGP, it is the more grassroots-oriented GPUSA that threatens to steal the thunder from its more electorally focused rivals -- and, potentially, affect how many votes Nader wins in November.

The ASGP and the GPUSA have vastly different personalities, agendas, and platforms -- a fact that seems lost on many in the mainstream press. Writing in the July 10 issue of the New Republic, for example, Jonathan Chait linked Nader to the "tofu-chomping, guitar-strumming naïveté" of the Green Party without distinguishing the two groups or their platforms. Syndicated columnist James Lileks did something similar last Saturday in the Boston Herald and other newspapers. (The Lawrence faction sent a letter to the New Republic making this distinction, but so far it hasn't run.)

Such confusion does not please ASGP stalwarts, who are far more moderate than their GPUSA counterparts. Chait was correct, for example, to write that the GPUSA platform calls for the abolition of the US Senate, the nationalization of the largest 500 corporations, "clemency for Leonard Peltier," a "new trial for Mumia Abu-Jamal," and "freedom for Lori Berenson," an American jailed in Peru for aiding the Tupac Amaru, a terrorist revolutionary group. But Nader is not running on the GPUSA platform. He is running on the ASGP platform -- a document crafted by Democratic activist Steve Schmidt, who worked on presidential campaigns for Michael Dukakis in 1988 and Jerry Brown in 1992 -- and it says nothing of the sort. The ASGP platform favors "proportional representation" (the type used in Cambridge city elections), employee stock-ownership plans, and a "fair minimum wage." The platform also voices opposition to the death penalty and support for gay marriage and the formation of a Civilian Conservation Corps. And the document says that "it is time to look at statutes and precedents to hold corporations accountable" for their actions -- which goes further than what the pro-business Democrats and Republicans have to say, to be sure, but not nearly as far as the GPUSA's pronouncements.

These divergent strategies and politics may play out locally during the October 3 presidential debate, which will be held under the auspices of the John F. Kennedy Library. The ASGP-backed Nader campaign has sued the debate commission to get Nader included in the debate with Vice-President Al Gore and Texas governor George W. Bush. The Lawrence-based GPUSA activists, meanwhile, are threatening to incite bedlam with Seattle-style protests outside the library if Nader is not allowed onto the stage, and maybe even if he is -- just to get their message out on the streets.

The protest plans are drawing criticism from more-moderate voices within the Green Party, the most prominent of which is Bowdoin College political scientist John Rensenbrink, one of the founders of the ASGP. "It's a kind of combative politics that doesn't help anybody," Rensenbrink says of the direct-action protests that Green-allied activists plan for the debates and the upcoming major-party conventions. "It's protest politics. It's shaking your fist at Big Daddy and thinking you're wonderful for doing it. To deliberately provoke is something that I feel at this point is somewhat counterproductive."

The Green effort in general is also drawing the ire of Paul Berman, a former '60s activist and the author of A Tale of Two Utopias: The Political Journey of the Generation of 1968 (W.W. Norton). Berman, who believes that the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank cannot be likened to the villains of the '60s, warns that Seattle-style activism will only work to the advantage of George W. Bush and the Republicans. Berman is sensitive to charges that the '60s radicals hurt Democratic presidential candidate Hubert Humphrey and helped elect Richard Nixon. "In 1968, I was violently opposed to Hubert Humphrey and so were most of my friends in the student movement," he says. "And one of the results of our opposition was that the Vietnam War lasted longer than it would have otherwise lasted."

"It's easy to look at the two main candidates and think you're not represented," he adds, "and then it's easy to delude yourself that your view has been suppressed or ground up under the heel of a police state. But these are delusions."

THEY MAY be delusions to Berman, but they're powerful visions to the Lawrence activists, who are likely to make the bigger splash locally in October. The mind behind that Lawrence faction is Jonathan Leavitt, a GPUSA official who co-chairs the Massachusetts Green Party with Stacey Cordeiro, founder of the Jamaica Plain Greens. On a sweltering July day, Leavitt has generously offered to give me a tour of the Bernstein Bookshop. Decidedly informal given his rank within a national political organization, Leavitt sports a shaved head, sandals, cutoff shorts, and a T-shirt that reads HAMPSHIRE COLLEGE FOOTBALL. The last item reflects Leavitt's sense of humor: the Amherst-based liberal-arts college doesn't have a football team. It's a sense of humor that he's employed to achieve his political goals -- such as when he planteda juicy kiss on yhe (male) leader of a "straight pride" protest rally on the UMass Amherst campus while a student

As we walk around the store, Leavitt rattles off a list of left-wing organizations and causes that operate out of the Essex Street location, including the Merrimack Valley Progressive, the Downtown Farmers Market, the Merrimack Valley Greens, and the Lawrence Grassroots Initiative, the not-for-profit group that Leavitt founded in 1992. African pop music comes out of speakers hooked up to a cassette player and turntable. Leavitt explains that the name of the store comes from one of the favorite sons of the Immigrant City -- composer Leonard Bernstein, who backed the Black Panthers, as famously immortalized in Tom Wolfe's essay "Radical Chic."

That said, this pocket of Lawrence is no bastion of leftist elitism. When two young Latina customers step in from the street, Leavitt is happy to explain the '80s-era poster headed THE WORLD ACCORDING TO RONALD REAGAN. "This guy Qaddafi was allegedly a terrorist. Daniel Ortega was a guy who overthrew a dictatorship and Reagan turned him into a monster," Leavitt says, pointing to the cartoon depictions of world leaders in the poster.

When the women leave, Leavitt walks up a flight of stairs to the one room that serves as the headquarters for the GPUSA. The small office is managed by the secretary of the GPUSA, Starlene Rankin, a Massachusetts resident who recently relocated from Iowa. The room, which the Green Party actually rents from Leavitt's Grassroots Initiative, houses a few desks and computers. In March, the office was broken into and all the computers were stolen. GPUSA officials believe the robbery was political -- like the 1980s break-ins at the offices of opponents of Reagan's Nicaragua policy. In other offices in the same building, no computers were touched.

Leavitt, who is 33, has been an activist virtually all his life. Born in Lawrence to a middle-class family, he moved to nearby North Andover with his parents when he was still young. During high school, he became a star basketball guard. He describes himself as the type of jock who'd go to the mat sticking up for the odd outcast.

After a brief stint after high school at St. Michael's College in Vermont, he moved back to Massachusetts and, after a year, made his way to UMass, where his nascent activism flourished. Activists such as Amy Carter (daughter of the former president) and Abbie Hoffman were trying to eject the Central Intelligence Agency from the campus. Inspired by their movement, Leavitt helped orchestrate a student strike that shut the Amherst campus down for a week. But that effort had as much to do with promotion as with progressive politics. "It was based on fabrication," Leavitt recalls. "We made people think there was a large organization behind the strike."

During this period, the young activist got to know Hoffman, the former Yippie who was nearing the end of his life. Hoffman had made a career out of high-profile antics and protests; once, he famously released hundreds of dollar bills on Wall Street. "I had read everything Abbie Hoffman had ever written, and I met him speaking at the Iron Horse Tavern in Amherst," Leavitt says. "Even in the midst of dealing with some serious issues, he found a way to stay human."

Leavitt's days at UMass ended abruptly -- and without a diploma -- when he was kicked out of school after his stunt at the straight-pride rally. He went to Europe, spent time living in squats, and worked on the effort to free Paul Hill, the man who inspired the film In the Name of the Father.

Leavitt returned to the states and in 1992 set up the Lawrence Grassroots Initiative, funded by member dues and foundation grants. He wanted the group to be "uncompromising." As he explains it: "I can't stand squishy politics. I can't stand people only willing to go halfway. That's why liberals fail."

Leavitt joined the Green movement in the early '90s, after attending a meeting in Holyoke. Right away, he was drawn more to the GPUSA than to the more electorally minded alternatives, although the Massachusetts Green Party is now affiliated with both the GPUSA and the ASGP. He likes the GPUSA's more grassroots style -- organized as a membership organization, for example, the GPUSA collects dues "based on ability to pay and the honor system," according to its party platform.

Leavitt contends that the ASGP's greater focus on electoral politics endangers the Green movement. "Electoral politics always corrupts people," he says. "The Green Party is naive to think it could be the exception." Granted, the attention lavished on the ASGP has been a boon to Leavitt's state group, which he says received e- mails from more than 1000 people interested in the party following the convention in Denver. State party membership has tripled over the past three months. But some of those people expressing newfound interest in the Green Party might be surprised to learn what Leavitt's group has to say. "We are anti-capitalist and anti-state ownership," he says. "We are for anarchist economics." Such economics means businesses that are "small-scale, worker-owned, democratically controlled, and ecologically sound."

Now, Leavitt sees the possibility of an activist spirit unheard-of in America since the late '60s and early '70s. "People are ready to do things they haven't done in my 12 to 13 years of organizing," he says.

But what is the goal of all this direct action? After all, America in 2000 is not Pinochet's Chile or Somoza's Nicaragua. "Our goal," Leavitt says, "is to really expose the Democrats and Republicans for what they are. If they don't allow the third-party candidates into the debates, it's going to take a police state to protect their view of the world."

LEAVITT IS just one of about 100 hard-core activists, many of them not affiliated with the Greens, who have been meeting at MIT and other locations around Greater Boston to make plans for the October 3 presidential debate. On a recent Thursday, one group is meeting at the Lucy Parsons Center, in the South End. Nearly 60 people have crammed into the tight space to debate tactics. It is so steamy that participants are fanning themselves with their IRAQ: UNDER SIEGE placards. Before a reporter can be admitted to the meeting, the group engages in a 30-minute Talmudic debate on the pros and cons of including the press. Leavitt argues that more press means more potential followers for the movement. Finally, they acquiesce.

During the meeting, there is much give-and-take on the relative merits of marching with organized labor, which may also demonstrate at the debate, as opposed to holding independent direct-action protests. "We've got to get people excited by this," Leavitt says. "That's what happened in Seattle. It's happening in Philadelphia and Los Angeles."

One bearded old-timer -- just returned from Mexico -- tries to buoy the spirits of the group. "We've got to get rid of world capitalism," he says, adding: "It's not going to be easy."

When the meeting lets out two hours later, not everyone is happy. One young, pierced animal-rights activist says he fears that direct action might get subsumed by the pro-Nader effort. "This is not a Green Party thing," he says of the upcoming protest, complaining that somebody shared an e- mail list for one of the organizational meetings with the Greens. "The Green Party doesn't own this." His comments reflect a common sentiment among this group: although many observers lump the Seattle-style protesters and the Green partisans together, people inside the movements are keenly aware of even the slightest distinctions. For those further to the left than the Green Party -- and there are many such people -- the protests around the political conventions and debates represent an opportunity to demonstrate against the system, not necessarily a time to help Ralph Nader. "Nader is a union buster and a millionaire," says another man at the meeting, who says he is affiliated with the Industrial Workers of the World (a/k/a the Wobblies).

That said, the GPUSA is trying to present a united front at the protests. Stacey Cordeiro, for example, spends most of her time in the field collecting signatures to get Nader on the Massachusetts ballot, but the Massachusetts Green Party co-chair says she shares Leavitt's "focus" on "trying to return some of the control of the economic system away from the corporations and back to the people."

Nevertheless, it's Leavitt's signature that will be on whatever happens outside the JFK Library October 3. And although Leavitt is somewhat critical of the ASGP establishment, he also has a better head for publicity than many of his fellow travelers on the far left. Like his hero, Hoffman, Leavitt has a knack for creative protest and attention-getting. And if we know anything about modern society in America, it's that the people who get the attention of television cameras are the people who define their movements. It will be up to clever foot soldiers like him to shape the legacy left by the pranksters of today.

Seth Gitell can be reached atsgitell[a]phx.com.