Who decides what policies the DNC chooses for their national platform? Obviously corporate donors effect the bottom line of the organization, but who are the power brokers internally at the DNC that make the decisions to create those policies that favor corporations over people?
This is their leadership team, but something tells me they’re not the ones making the decisions to not advocate for Medicare for all, or other widely popular left wing policies.
I think if you’re interested in changing the direction of the DNC, you’ll probably need to target local branches first. Ken Martin for example is the party chair of the DFL (MN org for Democrats), and got elected as DNC Vice Chair:
In 2017, Martin was elected by his peers throughout the country as the President of the Association of State Democratic Chairs (ASDC), and by that election became a Vice Chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC). On January 21, Martin was unanimously re-elected President of the ASDC. Upon his re-election, Martin pledged to continue “our important work of strengthening Democratic infrastructure across America.”
That voting process is probably what you’d want to target. He’s also probably the sort of “status quo” politician that you’d want to get replaced with a progressive.
It’s a combination of:
- Political consultants whose grasp of reality for normal people and the problems they face is nonexistent
- Donors, who add to that lack of understanding an explicitly hostile attitude to anything left-wing if it will cost them or their clients money
- The politicians themselves, who rarely if ever interact with anyone outside of these three groups
There are some exceptions, of course, but they’re rare. DC is really an incredibly strange and sociopathic place on a human cultural level.
This is why I don’t understand the attitude that the way to progress is to keep punishing the Democrats until they figure it out on their own. The ones who haven’t figured it out, which is most of them, aren’t going to figure it out, any more than Google is going to realize that ruining search was a bad idea and they need to start making products people like again. It’s just not in their DNA to think that way.
That’s a really precise breakdown and appears to hit the nail on the head.
What would be the most effective strategy to wake them up to the new political realities? Because I don’t think even this election did that.
I’d agree that it’s a bad idea to try and convince any existing leadership to move left. The post came across as more of a “How can we take over the party like the Tea Party did to Republicans” though, which seems productive.
I wasn’t aiming my snark at OP, although it might have sounded like I was. I was just expressing some annoyance with some people I’ve been talking with on Lemmy over the last couple of days. The “if we just keep hurting the Democrats, it’ll all work out for the best” crowd has a suspiciously large and vocal representation on Lemmy.
I think for a productive solution, we should wait for Bernie Sanders’s promised announcement about next steps for the Trump era. God knows, I have no idea. It seems pretty bleak.
The tea party was still an astroturfed movement by many of those same rich people that were in power, like the Koch brothers.
That’s true, but it was still an effective hostile takeover. Can it be done without support from billionaires, or did it only work to the tea party because it was bankrolled by them?
Donors, who add to that lack of understanding an explicitly hostile attitude to anything left-wing if it will cost them or their clients money
If that is their only concern why are they not supporting the party that wants to tax them less?
It’s mostly a contest of rich people who want as much as they can get, but do want the US economy to continue being okay, versus on the other side rich people who don’t mind burning it all down as they as they pay less taxes for the next few years. The Democrats are largely propped up by the former group.
The occasional leader like Biden or Obama who wants to be to the left of Reagan doesn’t change the fact that the “don’t burn it though” donor class is in charge of the Democrats. This is at the root of a lot of the things that make people say “but if Biden is good, why hasn’t he solved climate change or Israel or wealth inequality yet? Checkmate libs, he’s clearly the exact same as Trump.”
Mostly it all works out, over the long term, as a safe equilibrium for the majority of the wealthy people. The Republicans get to do their arson about half the time, which makes the super-wealthy even more wealth for a short time, and before it can get out of control, the Democrats come into power to put a check on it before it can start hurting the people who were born privileged. This election, that equilibrium has been upset, and Trump is planning to become unremovable and then badly hurt everyone, rich and poor alike, which probably means the rich people will manage to realize they fucked up and turn their media empires solidly against Trump and get rid of him. If they can. There may be a significant amount of damage that gets done by the time their now-antiquated weapons can accomplish that, if it’s even possible at all with Russia and a bunch of techbro rich idiots solidly in the tank for him. They may all have to simply shrug and abandon the US for some new parasitic host, leaving the corpse behind.
Of course you’re entitled to your view but I consider that an egregiously cynical take, not to mention a bit convoluted and with a hint of conspiracism. The fact remains that the Republicans are offering more money to them, up front, now, so the simplest explanation is that they are motivated by higher ideals than just money.
It comes across to me as much more realpolitik than needless cynicism. I also don’t think there’s any conspiracism in there, it’s much more game theoretic, in the sense that we’ve reached an uncoordinated local optimum that’s hard to break out of. There’s not nearly as many smoke-filled back rooms where deals are made as people think, but there is a lot of shared interest in not rocking the boat among wealthy people.
It’s an incredibly cynical take. I think it’s accurate, though. Observe how the Democrats generally treat Bernie Sanders, or for that matter how they treated Dan Osborn. I don’t think the idea that Washington mostly runs on money takes any kind of X-Files leap to take seriously.
I’m not trying to say we shouldn’t support Democrats, especially because they are the only viable party that has some nuggets of actual care for the people embedded within them in a few random places. But I don’t see any other explanation than the one I gave, in answer to OP’s completely valid question about why they keep giving such lukewarm endorsement to such incredibly sensible and popular ideas.
