Introduction from Oaklandsocialist: Here, Clay Claiborn comments on our previous article “Don’t support Jill Stein! A reply to Howie Hawkins”. Readers may also be interested in Clay’s 2020 article “Why Joe Biden is a lesser evil than Bernie Sanders or Greens’ Howie Hawkins.”  Clay blogs at Claysbeach.blogspot.com.

Clay Claiborne in 1975

You [Oaklandsocialist] dealt with some of the major problems with Hawkins’ comparison of Von Hindenburg vs. Hitler in 1932 Germany. Now, I would like to say a bit about his attempts to negate the differences between Goldwater and LBJ in 1964.

The Summer of ’64 was when I first started paying attention to politics, both electoral and more generally. I was 15 and the DNC was in my hometown, Atlantic City, NJ. It was the Mississippi Freedom Summer, and I had gone to the March on Washington the August before. It was the DNC of Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. The month before LBJ had just signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Vietnam War was not up in ’64, not the way it was in ’68. It was all about white supremacy in America. But Hawkins ignores this key component of the history of the times and focuses on the war so as to zero out the very real differences between a Goldwater campaign furthering the grip of white supremacy on the GOP and LBJ and a Democratic Party willing to make some concessions to the growing civil rights movement. 

He says “Johnson massively escalated the war in Vietnam that his progressive voters feared Goldwater would do.” The White House had engineered the phony Gulf of Tonkin attack, and LBJ had signed the Tonkin Resolution weeks before the 1964 DNC, so I don’t think anybody thought LBJ wouldn’t massively escalate the war. They did fear that Goldwater may have gone over to nukes, and he may well have, but the war wasn’t the main issue in 1964. It was the issue that the Green Party always ignores—white supremacy in America.

They pretty much ignored that difference between Trump & Clinton when they helped Trump win in 2016, and BTW, I don’t buy that line that Stein didn’t make the difference based on an ABC exit poll that claimed 8% of GP voters would have voted for Trump if he was the only Putin-fanboy on the ballot. What Hawkins et al ignore is the large number of voters they convinced to sit out the election b/c “it makes no difference.” That thinking handed state power the avowed white supremacists in 2016 with the results of the fall of Roe v. Wade, 1.1+ million dead from Covid and much much more. The Green Party would have done the same thing in 2020 if they could have, and now they’re back to help Trump et al get back into power.

White supremacy: the issue Howie Hawkins and the Green Party in general ignore.

Notice how Hawkins’ piece scrupulously avoid the topic of white supremacy, racism, etc. when that is at the core of the differences between Trump’s GOP and Biden’s Democrats, except to say that Biden has embraced many of the racist anti-immigrant policies of Trump. Unlike the Green Party, those actually seeking a majority of the votes have to make concessions to a racist anti-immigrant population. But to say this in an effort to equalize the two candidacies while Trump is making the deportation of 12 million immigrants, including many that have been in the US for decades, a centerpiece of his campaign, to to work in the service of that very mean white supremacist resurgence. 

Finally, in the last paragraph they reveal where they are coming from. After Trump wins, they see themselves as leading the movement against the repressive measures of a  white supremacist cabal in state power after they refused to play a positive role in the struggle to keep it from gaining state power in the first place. They need Trump to win, so they can play the hero. This is the white Left at its core.

Clay Claiborne in 1975