SNA (Tokyo) — The entry of Jill Stein into the 2024 US presidential race will provide progressive voters an alternative to both the revanchist narcissism of Donald Trump and the neoconservative militarism of Joe Biden.

“Across the country,” the campaign launch call explains, “people are tired of being thrown under the bus by wealthy elites and their bought politicians, tired of living paycheck to paycheck, struggling to pay the rent, locked into student debt and medical debt. And despite dire needs for health care, housing and food, as child poverty doubles and climate change accelerates, our resources to fix these crises are being squandered on the endless war machine, fueling misery and instability across the planet.”

Running as the candidate of the Green Party, Stein wants to offer voters an alternative to “the failed two-party system,” explaining that her campaign will “put a pro-worker, anti-war, climate emergency agenda front and center in this election and on the ballot across the country.”

While Stein is not the only progressive to declare their candidacy–she has been preceded by Marianne Williamson, Cornel West, and Cenk Uygur–she is likely to become the only one among them to actually be on the ballot in most US states during the November 2024 elections. Williamson and Uygur appear unlikely to win the Democratic Party primaries, and West lacks an organization capable of gaining wide ballot access.

Stein’s first press release since launching her campaign took on the issue of Israel-Palestine. She declared that “Israel’s attack on Al-Shifa hospital is a horrifying and brazen war crime before our very eyes. Attacking a hospital with bombs and snipers, shooting doctors and patients, cutting off power and blocking supplies keeping patients alive, including premature babies–these are not acts of war, they are acts of genocide. We call for an investigation of the Netanyahu regime’s war crimes, as well as the role of Biden and US leaders in aiding and abetting them.”

She added on social media that “I stand against the Democratic and Republican allies of war profiteers and AIPAC,” referring in the latter case to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the main element of the pro-Israel lobby in the United States which is currently waging a well-financed campaign to defeat the entire US progressive movement.

While most strongly progressive comments of this nature are currently being denounced in much of the US establishment as reflecting widespread “anti-semitism,” the fact that Stein happens to be Jewish is likely to blunt this line of slander in her particular case.

Other major policies advocated by Stein are a “Green New Deal” which would include a “massive investment in green jobs, industries, and technologies” as well as “an economy that works for all of us, not just the wealthy and powerful.”

While it is fully anticipated that the mainstream media will argue incessantly that any vote for Stein will effectively be a vote for the “greater evil” of Donald Trump, many US progressives believe that, by its endorsement of genocide or ethnic cleansing against Palestinians and other militarist policies, there’s really not much reason to continue to regard US Democratic Party leadership as constituting a “lesser evil” which is still worth defending.

Become a Shingetsu News supporter on Patreon and receive the “Japan and the World” newsletter by email each Monday morning.