I can't support the Green platform
In a conversation with an acquaintance about the political ethics of voting for Jill Stein, I realized that I had very little idea what the Green Party stood for. (Um...the environment?) So I spent a few hours today reading the Green Party platform. I can't say it was an exciting experience, but now at least I feel like I have some sense of what it means to be Green. I liked a good deal of what I read, but in the end, there were a few things that I just couldn't stomach.
note: At no point in this post am I going to discuss the political ethics of voting for a third-party candidate, in general, in a first-past-the-post race. If you want to read about that sort of thing, you're in the wrong place; this is a post unpacking what the Green Party specifically does and does not (claim to) stand for.
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1. There's actually a good deal to like about the Green platform. It's pro-UBI, (mostly) pro-immigration, pro-space, pro-Land Value Tax, and generally promotes its environmental agenda through disincentive taxes, rather than hard regulation. These are pretty incredible ideas, and I'd be overjoyed to see any of them move into the Overton Window of American politics in the near future. Good on the Greens for getting behind them.
Also in the list of good -- though less revelatory -- ideas are pro-LGBT, anti-prohibition, anti-incarceration, and pro-infrastructure planks.
2. There's a great deal more cloying utopianism that doesn't even mean anything on a policy level. There are pages upon pages that just read like "...and we will have better schools, and we will have stronger communities,