"I do think the Green Party can become a thing if they shed their "hippie" baggage which puts off most people"

I think there is much more to it than that. I know you like their economic ideas, but the vast majority of Americans, even on the left, regard them as hopelessly loopy in this regard.

And then we have to consider that their presidential candidate in 2008 was Cynthia McKinney, widely regarded as one of the dumbest persons to ever hold a seat in Congress. It's hard to take a party like that seriously.

That said, I would not rule out either a future duopoly of Libertarians and Greens, or a multi-party system in which the Greens were a minor party large enough to occasionally tip the balance on some issues. On non-economic issues I find myself largely in agreement with their platform, so that would be quite acceptable to me.

However, if we see a re-ordering of coalitions don't expect it to be a slightly newer version of the cold war coalitions. In her book "The Future and Its Enemies", Virginia Postrel has laid out a more convincing account of what our near-future coalitions will be about - which is to say, those who favor embracing the future opposed to those who fear it - and that cuts across party lines. We can also expect ethnic and racial coalitions to be split more evenly as the circumstances that gave rise to those voting blocks slip further and further from the present.




Baldur