General Politics thread

For reasons that are not hard to guess, historical parties of the Left — true parties of the Left — have, almost without exception, been mobilized externally.

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By contrast, not a single externally mobilized party has ever attained national electoral significance in the United States.

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In a genuinely democratic party, the organization’s membership, program, and leadership are bound together tightly by a powerful, mutually reinforcing connection. The party’s members are its sovereign power; they come together through a sense of shared interest or principle. Through deliberation, the members establish a program to advance those interests. The party educates the public around the program, and it serves, in effect, as the lodestar by which the party is guided. Finally, the members choose a party leadership — including electoral candidates — who are accountable to the membership and bound by the program.

It might seem obvious that those are the characteristics of a truly democratic party. Yet the Democratic Party has none of them.  

Start with the most fundamental fact about the Democratic Party: it has no members. A few months ago I was flattered to receive a letter signed by Debbie Wasserman Schultz, then chair of the Democratic National Committee, in which she urged me to consider sending a donation, thereby “becoming a DNC member,” in her words.

Was she proposing to let me vote on the Democratic primary schedule, or its mode of selecting convention delegates — or, for that matter, the next DNC chair? Obviously not. Mere “members” aren’t allowed to influence such decisions because, fundraising letters aside, there are no real members of the Democratic Party: “Unlike these [British, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand] democracies, where members join a political party through a process of application to the party itself, party membership in the United States has been described as ‘a fiction created by primary registration laws.’ ”

Just as the Democratic Party has no real membership, it offers only the most derisory semblance of a “program”: a quadrennial platform usually dictated by an individual nominee (or occasionally negotiated with a defeated rival) at the height of the election-season frenzy, a document that in most years no one reads and in all years no one takes seriously as a binding document. (At the state level, party platforms often reach hallucinatory levels of detachment from real politics.)

The Council of Europe, the pan-European intergovernmental body, maintains a “Code of Good Practice in Electoral Matters,” which catalogs electoral practices that contravene international standards. Such violations often read like a manual of US election procedure.

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“One of the best-kept secrets in American politics,” the eminent political scientist Theodore Lowi has written, “is that the two-party system has long been brain dead — kept alive by support systems like state electoral laws that protect the established parties from rivals and by federal subsidies and so-called campaign reform. The two-party system would collapse in an instant if the tubes were pulled and the IVs were cut.”