Jacobin Magazine has this essay by Ari Paul, criticizing the Working Families Party of Syracuse for consistently refusing to support Howie Hawkins even when Hawkins runs strong campaigns that have a chance of winning. Howie Hawkins is one of the best-known Green Party activists in New York state, especially in his home region of Syracuse. In 2011, Hawkins would have almost certainly been elected to the Syracuse City Council as a Green if the Working Families Party had either cross-endorsed him or stayed out of that race.
Jacobin Magazine is a print quarterly, founded in 2010. Thanks to Thomas MacMillan for the link.
Interesting article. Did the WFP keep their ballot line? The New Party was around in a number of states, and has morphed into other groups like smart growth coalitions. Surprising the New Party supported the Nets moving to New York and all that condemnation proceedings against regular working folks.
The Working Families Party easily polled enough votes in 2010 to keep its party status.
This column by Gina Bellafante, “A New Era for Progressives: De Blasio’s Win Is Sign of Working Families Party’s Advance,” in yesterday’s New York Times explained how the Working Families Party has been the driving force behind the rise of progressive politics in New York City.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/17/nyregion/de-blasios-win-is-sign-of-working-families-partys-advance.html
Mayor-elect de Blasio was supported by the Working Families Party in the primary, and it was instrumental in his surprise smashing victory. The new public advocate, Tish James, was — like de Blasio — opposed by all the New York papers in the primary, yet she won the runoff handily thanks to the support of the Working Families Party. She is the only New York City Council member ever elected solely on the Working Families Party line, but the new City Council will be influenced by the party. To quote the article:
” When Mr. de Blasio assumes office on Jan. 1, he will have at his hand a City Council with whom he shares a sensibility, again thanks in great part to the efforts of the Working Families Party. (The party determined its name after polling; Working Families beat out Common Sense, among other ideas.) As the party’s executive director, Dan Cantor, explained it, Working Families began recruiting candidates for Council races in 2007. In 2009, nine of the 10 candidates it had backed were elected. This allowed formation of the Progressive Caucus on the Council, which will grow to more than 20 members in January.
If not for a man named Jon Kest, a founder of the Working Families Party and a former executive director of another activist group, New York Communities for Change, which grew out of the disgraced community organizing group Acorn, we might now be approaching the era of Mayor Someone Else. Mr. Kest, who died last year, about a month after his daughter was killed during Hurricane Sandy, was one of Mr. de Blasio’s earliest and most ardent supporters during his first Council race and was talking about a de Blasio mayoralty 15 years ago. Mr. Kest spoke passionately about economic inequality and committed himself to organizing poor and low-income workers. He planned a large one-day strike of fast-food workers.
To much of this, the mainstream media had not been paying extensive attention. You would have had to be reading The Nation, with its flimsy Emma Goldman-era paper stock and outsider ethos, to keep up. Now, traffic to The Nation’s website is soaring, the magazine’s editor, Katrina vanden Heuvel, told me, and the traffic is being driven by coverage of Mr. de Blasio and Elizabeth Warren, the junior senator from Massachusetts. Progressivism is now ‘trendy,’ as Ms. vanden Heuvel put it, ‘though that isn’t exactly the right word because it diminishes the excitement.’”