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you know the Democratic Party is the party of fairness, because whenever they have to decide who their leaders should be the question they ask is “whose turn is it?”
@interfluidity I remember when that was the joke about the GOP, until sometime after Newt and the Freedom™ Caucus and Tea Party crowd took over.
Dems need their own version of insurgents. The closest thing is The Squad, but they need more primary challengers
@jonathankoren @interfluidity
Committee officer here, yes we absolutely need more primary candidates.
My district recently had to pick candidates to fill a vacancy created by a retiring state legislator, and hardly any candidates put themselves forth for consideration. Of those that did only one could be charitably called leftist or progressive.
More importantly, we need people to actually show up.
Like half the precincts in my district have no committee officer at all. In my decade long tenure representing my precinct for the party, no one has ever challenged me for the position, even though I barely fulfill the obligations.
@lackthereof @jonathankoren at levels beneath Federal office, the Democratic party simply does not exist. i get hundreds of e-mails soliciting donations. no events soliciting participation, offering an opportunity to meet candidates. i had no opportunity to meet or get to know a damned thing about the Ds who ran for state reps. i don't think there was a competitive primary. ofc in the general i just voted for the D. you can't have competitive primaries if no one has a clue who these people are.
@interfluidity @jonathankoren
And the organizational structure of the party is very much designed to encourage bottom-up power... Directly elected precinct officers defining their district orgs, District orgs controlling their county orgs, county orgs controlling their state party, state parties controlling the DNC.
I feel like this is why the same handful of shitty consultants always end up running the big national campaigns... The local parties are ghost towns, so hardly any meaningful leadership trickles up. Thus the national party is rudderless and falls into just kinda keeping on with the status quo by default.
@lackthereof @jonathankoren i wish i had any clue how to find this bottom-up party of which you speak. i guess the ghost towns are so ghostly they don't let us know where they are or how to visit.
Google "<state> <legislative district> democratic party"
Maybe they have a website?
It is also entirely possible that your whole district party organization consists of 3 retirees and 97 vacant positions, whose only online presence is a Facebook group.
@interfluidity @lackthereof @jonathankoren
i’d start by looking up your most local elections and seeing who is participating in the scene - probably literally email the candidates.
i’ve seen folks despair at the idea of running for school board to fight fascism but… that’s how the fascists started the current queer panic. they took over school boards & began banning books.
@phillmv @interfluidity @lackthereof school boards are the front lines and they’re very low investment elections
@jonathankoren @interfluidity @lackthereof
i think part of the problem is these are all absolutely excruciating jobs. school board trustee is a part time gig where i live, and barely remunerated. this is true for state legislators in many US states. whole system has been designed for the independently wealthy to participate not the hoi polloi
@jonathankoren @interfluidity @lackthereof
(i’ve been thinking about both how Everything Is Extremely Boring Meetings and how Heroic Effort Is Required Everywhere;
when i hear my one crypto friend wax poetic about governance structures and zero trust permission schemes i feel like the underlying desire is to pretend we can avoid Extremely Boring Meetings, a fantasy that you don’t need to sit and chat it out)