While any serious person is horrified at the prospect of a Trump/Vance presidency, some on the left are actually arguing that it won’t make that much of a difference. One would think that these people don’t matter, but they do. For one thing, even a swing of one or two percent in the vote in a few key states can determine who gets elected. In the second place, it’s impossible to build a real resistance to MAGA if we don’t really understand or underestimate its threat.

A recent article in New Politics is an example of the twisted thinking of much of the left. The article is by Howie Hawkins, who was a founding member of the Green Party and that party’s candidate for president in 2020. Hawkins argues that socialists should support the Green Party’s Jill Stein in 2024 rather than vote to keep Trump out.

Hawkins basically makes three arguments: First, that Jill Stein’s candidacy won’t help Trump get elected because those who will vote for Stein wouldn’t vote for Biden (now Harris) anyway; second that it doesn’t make that much difference whether Trump or Biden/Harris is elected; and third that Stein’s apologies for Putin in and of themself don’t disqualify her for any consideration. (Note: The same points made below also apply to the West/Abdullah presidential campaign.) Let’s consider these questions one-by-one:

Hawkins writes ‘The risk that Stein votes will “spoil” the election for Biden and elect Trump is very low.’ He cites an exit poll from Stein’s 2016 election that shows that 75% of Stein voters would either not have voted or would have voted for Trump if Stein had not run in that year. That was 2016, though. According to an April, 2024 poll, Biden was ahead of Trump in a two person race by 43% to 40% in the popular vote. However, when a Green Party candidate, Cornel West and RFK were included in the question, Biden and Trump polled the same at 38%. So, Hawkins’ claim simply does not stand up.

Not only that, but Stein will add her voice to the view that essentially the Democrats are the greater evil. That’s what she did in 2016 when her entire campaign was aimed at attacking Hillary Clinton, not Donald Trump. At that time USA Today reported, ‘Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein says Clinton is more dangerous than Trump: “Under Hillary Clinton, we could slide into nuclear war very quickly following her declared policy in Syria.”’ The video upon which this report is based has been taken down as apparently is an interview in which she called Trump a “peace candidate”.

In other words, Stein’s 2016 campaign helped Trump get elected by adding to the voices that minimized the dangers of Trump. She is sure to do the same in 2024, and in fact this is what Howie Hawkins does, which brings us to our second point: the claim that there is not a significant difference between the Republicans and Democrats.

Hawkins starts in on this by implying that the Democrats will put the Republicans in office. He implies this by quoting something that Hal Draper wrote in 1967. At that time, Draper basically said that there was little difference between the Democrats and Republicans of that era. By ignoring this aspect of what Draper wrote, Hawkins implies that the same is true today. Nothing major has changed, according to Hawkins.

Hawkins main point in quoting Draper is to point out the technical process through which Hitler took power. In 1932, the conservative Von Hindenburg actually appointed Hitler as chancellor. By citing this, Hawkins implies that the situations in Germany in 1932 and in the US in 2024 are similar. The two situations are entirely different. Then, there was a huge working class party – the German social democratic party, who failed to run their own candidate. Draper points this out in his article. What Draper fails to mention is the extremely divisive role of the German Communist Party, which labeled the Social Democrats as “social fascists” and refused to try to unite with them. In other words, there were two huge working class parties which, had they united, would have prevented Hitler from taking power. So, what is Hawkins’ point – that the Green Party is in a similarly powerful situation today? Surely Hawkins is not so deluded as to think that. In other words, the two situations are completely different.

More recently, the entire Brazilian left united to support the neoliberal Lula in order to defeat Bolsonaro in the second round of the 2022 election. The French left did something similar just this year in order to defeat Le Pen. Does Hawkins think they were mistaken?

Hawkins then clearly implies that there are no fundamental differences between Biden and Trump. “Instead of fighting the far right, exposing their lies, and ridiculing their extremist policies, Biden and other Democratic leaders have compromised with them,” Hawkins writes. It is true that the Democrats have compromised with the Republicans, but it is simply untrue that they have not exposed the Republicans’ lies. They have repeatedly done so regarding the false claims about the “stolen” 2020 election, around Project 2025, and more. In fact, it is Hawkins who fails to really expose the dangers the Republicans pose!

Hawkins claims that Biden’s domestic and international policies are essentially the same as Trump’s. Hawkins mentions oil drilling, immigration, trade wars and Israel/Palestine. In fact, on every single one of these there are significant differences. Trump, for example, calls

Trump denies the fact of human/capitalist caused global warming. 

for oil exploration in or near U.S. national parks and, more important, he denies the fact of human caused global warming. While Biden has increased the attacks on undocumented immigrants, his policy doesn’t begin to approach Trump’s call for “mass deportations” of “millions” of undocumented workers. Hawkins apparently forgets how Trump ripped immigrant children out of the arms of their parents and separated them from their families. Today, Trump calls for “the largest deportation operation in American history” and ramps up the demagoguery against Latin American immigrants to an extreme degree. Biden does not even begin to approach Trump’s heated ethno-nationalist demagoguery about “illegal immigrants” being “rapists and murderers” and so on. Hawkins ignores this demagoguery. This is entirely in keeping with his racist dog whistles.

Hawkins discusses the issue of abortion rights in a throwaway line about what must be done after Trump wins reelection. But Hawkins doesn’t explain that this is a key difference between the Democrats and the Republicans. In a reversion to the old segregationists’ calls for “states’ rights” to impose segregation, today Trump calls for states’ rights to impose male supremacists’ will on women to prohibit them from controlling their own bodies. As an election ploy, Trump claims he opposes a national ban on abortion, but if he and the party he controls gain power in 2025, they will try to impose exactly such a ban. To Hawkins, this is apparently unimportant. It’s the same with other key issues, including the runaway MAGA (in)Justices on the US Supreme Court, which Hawkins fails to mention altogether. Trump’s desire to declare martial law when he was president also gets no mention by Hawkins. And if you read Hawkins, Trump’s multiple attempts to overturn the 2020 election, up to and including the January 6 attempted coup either didn’t happen or is of no significance.

Then Hawkins criticizes Jill Stein for her apologizing for the fascist connected Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. All of his criticisms are valid, but

Jill Stein speaking at Rage Against the War Machine rally. She had no problem with the US and Russian flags behind her nor with fascists in the crowd.

Hawkins fails to draw the full conclusions. Hawkins fails to mention Stein’s speech at the infamous “Rage against the war machine” rally in Washington DC. That rally was a collaboration between the “left” and outright fascists. Stein channeled that collaboration. She repeated the position of Russian fascist Aleksandr Dugin that it’s not a matter of “the right or the left”. She gave the same classless position about the “few elites at the top vs. all the rest of us.” There is a history of this sort of vague, populist anti “elite” demagoguery vs. clearly referring to the working class vs. the capitalist class. This demagoguery has led to “left” sounding fascism in the US (and elsewhere). Today, such fascistic politicians as Republican Senator Josh Hawley use similar rhetoric. Hawley bashes Wall Street and “big tech”. It is the position of outright fascists like Matt Heimbach, who was also present at the Rage Against the War Machine rally. In fact, the rally was permeated through and through  with fascists and semi-fascists including the Lyndon LaRouche crowd, Jordan Page, who wrote the Oath Keepers anthem, and others. Stein has no problem collaborating with them, and Hawkins apparently has no problem with that collaboration.

This encapsulates the disaster that has overtaken the left, socialists included. The majority of it has been drawn into a web that includes the far right. This is what Oaklandsocialist showed in our article Putin Draws the Left into the Far Right.  Jill Stein is a poster child for the participation of the “left” in this far right web, for which Putin is the main orchestrator. It is inexcusable that Hawkins should give Stein a pass on her entry in the far right web. Even if Hawkins’ claims that there is not much difference between the Republicans and Democrats were true, even if it were true that a Jill Stein campaign for president will not help Trump, even then Stein should be disqualified for any support by socialists because of her collaboration with the far right and her apologies for the world leader in bringing together ethno-nationalist and traditionalists forces – Vladimyr Putin.

Hawkins apparently clings to the Green Party out of hope that it will develop into some real working class force. It will not. It is a petit bourgeois party that will never go beyond that, with one possible exception: If a real movement from below develops for a genuine working class party, some capitalists could throw their resources into the Green Party in order to try to prevent the rise of a true working class party. In that case, the Green Party will become an out-and-out capitalist party.

Unlike the Green Parties of Europe and Canada, the US Green Party is without real structure or a real membership. It is organized just like the Democratic Party. It is purely an electoral party that does not focus on building a movement in the streets, work places, unions and working class communities. As a loyal Green Party member, Hawkins in reality has the same electoralist vs. activist orientation. He shows this in his final paragraph, in which he writes “if Trump wins we must immediately build and sustain mass pubic opposition to the repressive and reactionary policies of his administration.” In other words, don’t bother building a movement against Trump and MAGA now. This is important because Trump & Co. are already planning to steal this election should that be necessary: According to the Brennan Center there are 201 state legislators in seven different states who are election deniers. Many of them are in key positions. Should they find it necessary, they will try to overturn the results of the popular vote for president in their states. Such a measure would end up in the Supreme Court, where the MAGA (in)Justices rule supreme. As Oaklandsocialist has shown, even Chief (in)Justice Roberts has dropped the pretense of “impartiality” and this court could well rule in the election deniers’ favor should they find that politically necessary. In this regard, the problem with the Democrats is not that there is no difference between them and the Republicans; it’s that they don’t offer a real resistance to the Republicans’ schemes to overthrow democratic rights in the United States. That includes the Democrats’ plans to confine the election issue to court challenges. And the problem with Hawkins & Co. is that they are even worse! They would have us ignore these issues altogether. It is necessary to start now to build a movement in the streets, work places, unions, and working class schools to stop Trump and MAGA.  Of course, how would it be possible to build such a movement now if one dismisses the extreme danger of Trump and MAGA, as Hawkins and his type do?