|
A Blueprint
for Taking Back the Democratic Party
May
2001
by TygrBright
Part
Four: Learn From Experience
The first step to taking back our Party is to understand
how we lost it. It was a slow and subtle process that combined
two forces—internal decay and an external attack that used
many tools—subversion, bribery, and propaganda among them.
Neither would have succeeded alone—in concert, they are deadly.
There are two main symptoms of the internal decay that affects
our Party, and to understand the causes we must examine those
symptoms. The first symptom is the steady falling-off of participation
in Party activities, committees, and leadership at the local
levels.
Time was in any major U.S. city (and many, many small towns
and rural communities) that the Democratic Party functioned
as much like a social club as a political entity. Party members
attended meetings in large numbers, held picnics and get-togethers,
organized youth activities, and performed volunteer and community
service under the Democratic Party sponsorship.
They also ran for local Party offices—committee chairs, treasurers,
representatives to higher-level committees, etc. The structure
used to be much more "bottom up" than it is today.
Local committees fed leadership to regional committees, regional
committees to state committees. The state committees fed leadership
to the national Party organization, and the national Party
organization relied on the state leaders to deliver the nuts
and bolts of Party power—votes and volunteers.
The second symptom of internal decay is the large numbers
of states switching from a caucus/convention nominating process
to a primary election nominating process. While appearing
to be a "populist" move, the net effect of this
change has been to give the Democratic voter the illusion
of control while taking away the substance.
The pathology responsible for both of these symptoms is an
unavoidable side effect of true populism—but rather than coming
to terms with this reality and working to provide the remedies
needed, the Democratic Party has chosen to let the disease
run its course.
What is this "pathology?"
Anyone who still lives in a caucus/convention state—or anyone
old enough to remember the process from before their state's
change—can probably recall grueling marathons of deadlock,
ideological harangue, and vicious political maneuvering that
sent the average Party member home with a migraine, reeling
and vowing, 'never again!'
Republicans rarely experienced such painful sessions, relying
on more hierarchical leadership and more restrictive rules.
"Populist" Democrats were petrified of being charged
with denying some group or faction the fullest possible participation
in the process, with the consequent laissez-faire meeting
structures enabling special interests within the Party to
hold an entire caucus or convention hostage until a war of
attrition finally decided the issue.
It would appear to be a Catch-22—to have real populist leadership
of our Party, we must rely on a structure that requires some
decidedly un-populist rules in order to be effective. Nevertheless,
even with such rules (debate limits, platform committees empowered
to aggregate resolutions, etc.) a caucus/convention system
gives Party members real control of their Party and their
nominees/elected representatives.
However, it demands in return a much greater commitment from
the Party members—the attendance of meetings, the service
on committees, and other time-consuming and sometimes frustrating
chores of a truly empowered citizen. Thus the move to "Democracy
Lite," in which you can salve your conscience thinking
that 90 seconds in a primary election voting booth, means
exercising meaningful control of your party and fulfilling
your responsibility to participate in democratic self-government.
And we've seen where that leads. Straight to the current
mess of pseudo-Democrats who control our Party today.
The external attack bears many faces: the propaganda used
to set one segment of our Party against another, the corporate
bribery that enables Party leadership to groom candidates
and win elections without paying more than lip service to
the membership, and internal subversion by anti-populist special
interest groups hostile to the Party's traditional philosophies
and ideology, to name just a few. They are all damaging, but
without the abrogation of responsibility by Party members,
they would not have proceeded to weaken the Party to its present
hollow shell.
ON
TO PART FIVE »
Learn
From the Opposition
|
