Nineteen-year-old Michael Acosta is not exactly sure why voters his age do not flock to the Green Party. He was a Democrat himself, but now organizes the campus Greens at Lehman College. He switched just a few months ago, but none of his friends followed suit. That did not surprise him.

“The whole reason you call it a grassroots movement is because it’s down in deep,” he says. “Nobody sees it, nobody notices it.”

The New York Green Party has many identities: radicals who like to rehash the ferment of the 60s, fringe intellectuals who rattle off histories of English imperialism since the Spanish Armada, disgruntled progressives who like Ralph Nader.

They do not always coalesce.

But they did come together May 31 at Hunter College for the New York Green Party convention. The factions were often at cross-purposes. Some see the party as a political entity, one that requires ballot access, savvy candidates and a jolt of professionalism to thrive. Others are committed to romantic notions of sweeping change and an image of the Green Party as a movement, one that marches, organizes and petitions before mounting national campaigns.
The fissures can bubble over into chaos.




At the New York Green Party convention at Hunter College May 31, participants chose delegates to the national convention (top) and held seminars, like the one led by Susan Cushman (below), chair of the Peace Task Force at All Souls Church, about recharging the anti-war movement.




Anarchists for Obama
At a crisp 9:45 a.m., a few dozen Greens trickle in to hear Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping—a “gospel choir” of activists who croon an anti-consumerist message—give the convocation. But the Reverend does not show up. Instead, Mike O’Neil, one of the younger panelists and a relative newcomer to the New York Greens, asks the crowd for a “change-allujah.”

He gets one, loud and clear.

Most of the people in the room seem to run in the same circles, many of a demographic not a prime target in today's politics. They are here because they lived through, and were exhilarated by, the political convulsions of the 60s, and hope the Green Party, little more than a decade old in America, will offer a way to recapture that spark.

That, or they want to toss around theories about the government's role in the assassination of Martin Luther King and ruminate on the legacy of Karl Marx.

The question at hand: how to build the Green Party in New York. As O'Neil talks about balancing “online agility” with “street-level dedication” for a sleeker, more efficient Green Party, the first faultline underlying the group's identity erupts.

Ed Hush is a Green from Queens and self-styled historian of fringe politics (after the panel, he trails off into an extensive history of the Green Party in Berlin). He thinks the party must first become a grassroots movement, and that losing ballot access—a notorious obstacle for third parties—might be healthy.

“In New York, it seems like we're on reset, and that's a good thing,” he says. “Greens need to propose a platform that's solid and substantive, that puts us on the next level.”

There is a cascade of grumbling and head shaking both during and after his rant. At least some seem uncomfortably aware of this more radical wing in their party.

But to Hush and others like him, a forecast tidal wave of Democratic momentum this year threatens to subsume Green Party politics, unless it appeals to its natural constituencies and builds a movement from the ground up.

“A lot of people call themselves Green but vote Democratic,” Hush says. “I meet anarchists who want to talk about Hillary and Obama.”


Bird lovers, Ralph Nader and the fall of capitalism
Later in the day, the group scatters into breakout sessions on a variety of progressive causes. The most popular one focuses on the Green Party’s signature issue: climate change.

When the floor opens for discussion, participants flood the panel with a litany of complaints and myriad suggestions of varying feasibility. One man complains about buildings leaving lights on all night, a seemingly superfluous waste of resources. He is outraged.

That is, until someone else in the crowd explains that the buildings keep their lights on at the request of the Audubon Society, to keep birds from crashing into them at night.

The man pauses and looks around.

“All right, so there’s a complication I'm not aware of,” he says.

The group then gets sidetracked into a strategy session on how to stop capitalist growth.

An older woman in the audience tries to steer the discussion back toward conservation, but cannot help letting her predilection for radical politics slip.

“I'm very happy to hear people talking about the fall of capitalism,” she says.

That night, after the end of the daylong Green rumination on the demise of the “fatally wounded capitalist monster,” Ralph Nader, who split with the party after catapulting it onto the national stage, held a rally downtown for his independent presidential bid.

Few at the convention seem interested, except to express their fear that out-of-the-loop Greens might pick him as their candidate again at their national convention over the summer.

The party at this convention is clearly different from the one Nader branded in 2000. The preferred candidate of the New York Greens, former Georgia Rep. Cynthia McKinney, herself once a Democrat, is a champion of, among other things, the 9/11 truth movement. In lionizing “Cynthia,” as she is known to supporters, the Greens—bird lovers and anarchists alike—hope to change perceptions about the identity of their party, whatever those perceptions may be.

“People have to learn that peace is not a bad word,” concludes one older Green named Fred, discussing the need for new leadership. “It's not just a bunch of hippies trying to ruin people's afternoons.”