Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:03 And if the freedom democratic, I am confident that the democratic party will reunite on the basis of democratic principles and that together we will March towards a democratic victory in 1980.
Speaker 1 00:00:22 I think the democratic leadership understands that we need to bring those people into the party. We need to transform the party. We need to make the democratic party, the democratic party with a small gate.
Speaker 0 00:00:35 I think the future of the party is working class. And I think that what I represent and, and perhaps, you know, Senator Sanders also Senator Warren, there's a lot of working class champions in the democratic party. And I do think that that's the future.
Speaker 2 00:00:50 Welcome to talking strategy, making history I'm Dick flux activist, retired professor of sociology and a really old guy. And I'm DACA
Speaker 3 00:01:04 Lera, more hall, a slightly less
Speaker 4 00:01:06 Old guy, and also an activist and political strategist. And this season on talking strategy, making history, we're going to be talking about one of the big questions for progressive strategy here in the United States, in what we're calling a Hitchhiker's guide to the democratic party.
Speaker 2 00:01:25 We decided that DACA should help us map the democratic party by laying out, uh, its structures. He is after all vice chair of the democratic party of the state of California. So he has some very direct lived experience, but he's also that political science major kind of guy who can lay it all out to start us off. What is the democratic party as a structure? Does it even exist?
Speaker 4 00:01:54 Heaven save us from political science majors. So yeah, describing the actual structure of the democratic party and just a few minutes is, is hard. And it's, uh, paradoxically hard because, uh, at the same time, it's, uh, it's very complex, but also not very powerful, really as an entity in comparison to, you know, politicians as individuals and let alone the huge machinery of campaign finance and lobbying and advocacy, the party itself as an organization, um, really fits in between the margins of all of those powerful political forces in the United States. Uh, but I'll give it a shot. And, and the first thing is to define what even a political party is. And that's where, you know, political scientists have, uh, used an analogy of three interlocking circles, usually to describe what a political party looks like in modern democracy. And it's a, it's a helpful model.
Speaker 4 00:03:02 It's a helpful diagram. And what they say is that a political party is three things at the same time and each of these spheres or circles, interlock and interact in different ways in different political environments, in different countries, but a party is a team of folks in government. So Nancy Pelosi and her caucus of Democrats in the house of representatives, the Democrats in your state legislature, even Democrats together in a large city council, that's the party in government political scientists would say, and then there's the party organization. The thing like that I'm elected within as a state party officer, the district clubs and the precinct boards and so forth. These, this is the actual structure of the democratic party. And then finally, there's the voters in the electorate who either are registered with the democratic party, uh, in states where that's possible, or, you know, at the very least are identified with and could vote for the party.
Speaker 2 00:04:06 Right. And, uh, the last, uh, is interesting because it's not only people who are registered, but maybe people who think of themselves as Democrats, right. It's part of a lot of people's identity. And, and the reason, uh, I think we, we want you to dwell on this or develop this as, because so much of discourse by, by activists is often so simplify, they talk about the Democrats. And one of the things I think you're trying to convey, uh, is the multiplicity of this name, the Democrats, and what is the democratic party is not a single entity, which is very important. I think, for thinking strategically to get that and to understand that,
Speaker 4 00:04:52 Oh, absolutely. And, you know, to put it in comparison to really underline how strange that arrangement is, the very loose arrangement is between voters, the party organization, and the elected politicians. If you compare it to a parliamentary democracy, you usually find very centrally organized parties and ones where the membership, the activists, the people in the organization directly choose who the candidates are. Uh, and then therefore directly choose who the party in government is going to be. And in some cases, they even get to choose or have input over what roles, individual elected officials play in the party in government, you know, who gets to be the leader who gets to be the deputy leader, et cetera. So in America, in the United States, we're really characterized by a very weak set of relationships between the, uh, the, the, the different aspects or these different spheres of the party.
Speaker 4 00:05:54 And one thing that you hit on that's really important is that this isn't just a question of political will or culture. It's not just, it's not like the Democrats and the Republicans. If they decided tomorrow to have a more disciplined and tightly knit party, they could, it's built into the electoral system, right? In a parliamentary system, you have the assumption of parties and people often vote for parties or lists of candidates on a party list. And it's the parties who decide who then the executive is going to be in government. Whereas in the United States, we elect thousands and thousands of individual people. I think the number is even, it's like 300,000 elected offices in the United States. And most of them are elected on a formerly non-partisan ballot. And even the ones that are partisan, the selection of the candidates is done by thousands and thousands of people in a primary, right? Nothing like a European parliamentary system where that's the activists or the apparatus of the party who decides who the candidates are. Anybody can check a box and say, I'm going to run in a democratic primary. And if they get more votes, they're the official Democrat.
Speaker 2 00:07:07 And sometimes the local membership or active membership can try to hold those people accountable or, or make endorsements that, uh, that foreground people who really will fit in with the prevailing ideological and policy views. And sometimes the local party organization isn't that strong or coherent. Right.
Speaker 4 00:07:33 Right. And so that's, that's a question of activist energy from community to community. I mean, the, the relationship of the party to the election. So whether a, an election is a partisan one where just the party registered voters get to choose who the candidate will be for the general or it's one like a jungle primary. We have here in California, where the top two vote getters from whatever party, you know, advance to the general election. There's, there's 50 different systems for this. And as a result, there's, you know, party organizations within every chamber of state governments around the country, that where the elected officials come together and decide what candidates to support and move up the chain and, and, and so forth. And those, those groups of elected officials, the, the alphabet soup of organizations, you often hear of the democratic congressional campaign committee, the democratic Senate campaign committee, et cetera, they don't have any real connection to the party organization.
Speaker 4 00:08:42 It's, it's just the party in government getting together and doing an election operation to kind of choose who gets to fill the, uh, the ranks of the party in government and what you hit at Dick that trying to figure out how the party activists can intervene in all of that in a strategic way as Democrats and have influence over who the candidates are, for example, uh, is, is just a key struggle that if you look at the history of the democratic party, there's just always a battle going on where the grassroots are trying to get more control, but at the end of the day, the party, just like the NAACP or the Sierra club, or, uh, the sunrise movement, um, or anybody else, the, the labor movement, the partier is, is really a civil society organization out there also trying to influence candidates without any real direct control over them.
Speaker 2 00:09:39 Right. And part of strategy and tactics, if you will, of changing the party is to figure out how to deal with that situation, how to make use of it, or how to overcome it or change it. Um, that's been the experience of party reformers, and we'll be from here on it. And that's part of what I think we're trying you and me on this podcast to, to encourage people to really think about as we go forward.
Speaker 4 00:10:06 Exactly. And just to finish up to wrap up this mini community college poly psy one-on-one, uh, introduction to parties is that ultimately the political parties role in politics is to keep politics political. And that, that sounds kind of silly to say, but in the absence of party labels or people, or having organizations that have control over who gets to use the party label in the absence of that electoral politics becomes like high school politics, where it's the charisma or, or special, uh, you know, unique, uh, compliments of a, of an individual that drives whether somebody gets elected versus somebody else by, by saying, okay, in order to run as a Democrat, either to win the primary or to carry the party's official endorsement in a, in a city council or school board race, when we make that mean something that in order to have the democratic parties label and an organization, hopefully a grassroots organization that comes along with it to help you get elected, that the cost for that in a sense is that you have to be a good Democrat and stand up for democratic values and stand up for a set of policy preferences that the grassroots has a role in shaping making the party do that is a constant creative, uh, project because it's not set in stone or set in law that the party will even fulfill that basic function.
Speaker 4 00:11:44 And that to me is a tremendous opening for progressive activists to like get engaged, but they have to be willing to build the party as they're changing it.
Speaker 2 00:11:53 So when you read the sort of social media discourse, let's say of progressive activists about the democratic party, they will blanketly often use the term, the Democrats, or sometimes they will talk about the DNC as if it had a mind of its own or Polosi as if she was the controlling force. This kind of conversation is usually, I think, carried on by people who either don't want to work within the democratic party or trying to, uh, digitalize it in one way or another, or are feeling frustrated and disillusioned because they were Sanders, uh, activists who felt screwed in 2016 and now in recent times by the party. So what are they talking about? I mean, part of why I think we're doing this podcast is to try to get people in that kind of conversation, to be much more aware of the, the not only nuances, but the necessity of knowing who the targets of anger should be rather than simply using terms like the Democrats or even the DNC. Yeah.
Speaker 4 00:13:10 Largely because of the understandable anger around the, the leaked record of people who worked for the democratic national committee, clearly having a bias in the presidential primary, which they shouldn't have. Right. Um, or, or shouldn't be, shouldn't be expressing on the, on, uh, on, on, on work hours we should say. Um, and, and, and so then, because of that, I think, you know, the DNC as an actor, um, as an institution yeah. Just as you said, became, is become sort of stand in for either the entire party or, um, the evil side of it. And, you know, in fact, the DNC is neither of those things, right? It's, it's a, it's a body that exists, um, with the primary task of, uh, organizing the presidential primary system or the presidential convention nominating convention. Um, and in between just like a state party would, or even a county party, it has a very general mandate for just kind of helping there be democratic activity.
Speaker 4 00:14:18 And, um, the members of the DNC are, you know, so, uh, sort of got they, they are put on the DNC through several different mechanisms in some states they're elected, uh, by a body of the state body and other, in other states they're, I think completely appointed. And then there's a lot of them that are appointed by the chair. And, and one thing that's a pattern with democratic organizations is that the kind of mandate and specific powers of the, the democratic body, small D democratic body in this case, the DNC, um, which of which a lot of the members are elected by an elected body. Um, but, but the, the powers and specific mandates are very vague or small, which gives the chair a tremendous amount of power. Um, and in this case, the chair of the DNC though, you know, doesn't get to set policy, doesn't get to call the president if it's a Democrat or called Nancy Pelosi and say, you've got to be for the green new deal.
Speaker 4 00:15:22 Like, you know, Paris doesn't have that power, but Paris does get to decide things like, uh, almost unilaterally, um, like what kinds of debates, um, are going to happen as part of the primary process, um, gets to a point, a lot of people to committees that do make decisions. And it really has a lot more power than I think, any kind of like healthy participatory organization would have all that being said. The DNC is a group of people. Um, a lot of whom are grassroots activists, some of whom are lobbyists, some of whom are elected officials, um, who don't have a tremendous amount of power. And certainly aren't all of one mind and certainly represent, you know, a range of ideologies and positions within the party. Um, and it's, and it's not a cabal. I mean,
Speaker 2 00:16:07 If I could sum up that theme, it's it's to quote Bernie Sanders actually, who said, uh, we want to make the democratic party democratic that's right. And I think that sounds pretty obvious. So let me just say one more thing about that, which is at the base, the democratic party is the diversity of the United States of America at this point, uh, making the party really represent that fully is I think one way, I want to begin to think about the goal that we have. I don't know if that makes sense, but that's, that's what inspires me right now as a thought, because, because the base is there for it, but their capacity to influence the overall framework that the party provides remains limited,
Speaker 4 00:16:57 Limited. And yet there it is. And we've got to figure out the strategy exactly. Right. And that's where our conversation with Mathias layman from the sunrise movement sort of comes in. Cause that's one organization, you know, built by young activists with a tremendous sense of urgency and cannot wait as we, we just can't as a, as a planet and as a human community, wait for democratic politicians or let alone Republican politicians to understand the climate crisis and start to make movement on it. And so they have really taken up the mantle of the green, new deal, obviously building on some great old traditional democratic politics and taking it further to argue for a radical
Speaker 3 00:17:43 Transformation of the economy and society in order to make it sustainable. And with an, with success
Speaker 0 00:17:50 So far, just give me the name, the spirit of Mathias.
Speaker 3 00:18:07 Welcome. Uh, thank you for talking
Speaker 4 00:18:10 With us today. Mathias is the digital director for the sunrise movement and a longtime political activist and campaign worker and thinker. So thanks a lot for coming on.
Speaker 5 00:18:23 Thanks for having me.
Speaker 4 00:18:24 So we're going to just jump right in the work that the sunrise movement is doing. And first of all, you know, thank you for it. Um, it's certainly been really exciting to see, um, some of the really important confrontations that, uh, that the movement has provoked, um, in such a short amount of time. But we're thinking today on, on, in this episode about how we can kind of map the democratic party and think about it, and the sunrise movement is an organization with an agenda, um, of, you know, making actual progress on the climate issue. And, um, it seems that very often what you're up against your opponents, the, the people or the forces or the thinking that's in the way of making progress are Democrats, how would you describe to someone like what kinds of Democrats they are, where are they in the party? Who is,
Speaker 5 00:19:18 Yeah, well, I mean, obviously, you know, when it comes to climate change, at least Democrats aren't the main obstacle, but they're the moveable offs, right. Um, and many of them are pretty close to being the main obstacles. So the, the key point of tension that we've highlighted is the amount of fossil fuel money that informs the party's decisions and many candidates decisions. So honestly, if you look at a lot of the candidates that we've primaried, for example, you'll note that they're very, very high up in Congress, uh, for renting of Canada, who's taking the most corporate money. Kennedy is taking the most fossil fuel money, obviously. Um, Henry KR, who we almost took down the primary, Dan Lapinski, Richard Neil. We lost that one too. Of course, Joe Crowley and Elliot angle. These are all candidates that actually take a significant amount of money from corporate interests and particularly from fossil fuels. So that's how we've sort of judged where a candidate can be pushed them, where they can't is where their funding comes from
Speaker 2 00:20:22 The base of the democratic party. The people identify as Democrats tend to be quite ready and even eager now to support the agenda that we are as progressive and socialists, trying to advance in this country, campaign contributions may disrupt those agendas, uh, even, uh, even in districts that seem safe and have strong minority or, or majority minority populations. So here's, here's a thought that to me is really important directly on climate change. It has to do with Jerry Brown. So here's the governor more than perhaps any other governor in this country who, uh, represented himself as a champion of, uh, really dealing with climate change. And yet my sense is that the environmental movement was extremely frustrated with Brown's, uh, policy attitudes on fracking. He refused to, uh, uh, support the, the anti-fracking, uh, directions of the, of environmental protest and movement. Um, what do we make of that? Well,
Speaker 5 00:21:34 And it's not just him. Uh, Gavin Newsome has been, you know, snacking at Trump with the climate change is real tweets, which are great. Uh, then why is he approving so many new fracking permits? Yes. Um, and I think what it feels like it boils down to is there's this narrative that's existed in environmentalism for decades, which is, I think it's a, it's a, it's a bi-fold narrative. The first is the focus on these charismatic megafauna, you know, coral reef, polar bears, and the, you know, they're cute animals, but if someone's struggling to, to afford health care, to afford housing, they're really not thinking about polar bears in their day-to-day lives for the most part. And the second is this contrast between jobs and climate, right? That's how it's always been presented. Well, we, we have to take the steps to help the economy. Don't go too far, don't mess with jobs.
Speaker 5 00:22:28 Um, and that to me feels fundamentally absurd. Climate change and averting climate change is the most monumental task that we as human kind could like tackle right now there's so much work to be done and, and, and work means jobs. And so, uh, it, it's, it's wild to me that we have, like, what is, what, what seems like the most marketable political issue possible, these, the survival of civilization and humanity, as we know it. Uh, and, and again, the monument is past of doing all that work and somehow we've convinced ourselves there's no jobs in averting climate change,
Speaker 4 00:23:11 Right. That it's too expensive. Yeah.
Speaker 5 00:23:12 That's too expensive. Like, yeah, it's true. I mean, it's too expensive in as much as we'd be paying a lot of people to do a lot of work, and those are called jobs. That's good. Right. Exactly. We don't say Amazon's too expensive. Well, you know, Amazon doesn't pay its workers. So I guess that's a little different, very well it's cheap, but, you know, we, we don't say that, uh, uh, mining is too expensive, um, because you know, workers used to get pensions because work had good wages, we just call those good jobs. Um, and so I look at, you know, a lot of these representatives and it feels like they're still falling for that dichotomy of, yeah, I want to take action, but I don't want to be disruptive to the economy.
Speaker 2 00:23:55 Maybe I'm trying to put my self in the shoes of say brown or Newsome in this kind of thing. Uh, they in, they know what has to be done in the long run or they say they do. And they were pretty explicit about it, but the short run, they don't want to be responsible for disempowering people who are now employed. That might be the things that are in their mind in that connection. Is there, is there a potential strategic advantage in the environmental movement group, like sunrise pressing for simultaneously stopping these projects and paying attention to the needs of those who are workers who are dependent on projects as a part of the, or maybe you're doing that already.
Speaker 5 00:24:39 Yeah. I mean, that's, that's what a green new deal is, right?
Speaker 2 00:24:42 There's the problem of getting the green new deal once it's implemented as a total agenda that is bought into, by majority of people in a state like California, or we're in governing positions, that's the goal I presume where the approximate goal, meanwhile, brown goes ahead and refuses to ban fracking that I think was his particular case. This situation is what leads to activists on the environmental or left side saying we can't work with the democratic party because they sell us out.
Speaker 5 00:25:15 So I would say that the connection that you're talking about there, right, making sure that what we are engaged in is simultaneously a reduction of our, our emissions reduction of our pollution, et cetera. And, and also really we could call it reparations for the climate damage that has been done already. And for the existing jobs that will be collateral of these changes. Right. And it's tough because people don't have those two concepts linked directly in their minds. Right. And it's very easy to split them up. And at that point, it's one thing that's popular, but expensive. And one thing that's unpopular. And if you don't do both of them, it feels hard to balance. So I think that is the core task is getting people to really associate those two things, um, and see them as not just connected, but as two sides at the same point, you know, you, you can't do one without the other, right.
Speaker 4 00:26:13 I'm gonna say if, if I could add it, it seems to me that even the harder piece of that is actually the, the affirmative planned public expenditure piece, right? So it's not just that politicians are afraid to, you know, be held responsible for the loss of what in the end could actually just be a handful of jobs. They get hammered for that. Um, but also like in order to the new deal, part of the green new deal, you know, is a jobs and is public investment in housing and infrastructure and that money, you know, you got to tax somebody to, to pay for that. And there's a lot of timidity still left among elected officials about, um, you know, raising taxes and, and, and being bold in terms of public programs. So I'd say that it's, it's both on the protection, environmental protection side, and also on the, you know, the social democratic part of the green new deal. You're saying
Speaker 2 00:27:09 That, but I think, I think now we have the reality that this country actually did that year on a massive scale for a period of time. And that seems to me, something the emergency of the climate change is certainly even more powerful than the emergency of the pandemic. I think
Speaker 5 00:27:31 That connection that you're drawing is exactly correct. Um, I mean, we just spent, again, $2 trillion, uh, very inefficiently, but we did so to prop up, uh, basically people's jobs that they either weren't able to do safely or weren't able to do at all. And if we're going to be doing that, we might as well be doing it for jobs that are long-term beneficial for us as a society, um, to go back to that, the new, new deal point. The thing that I have started to be very music hearing is seeing the green new deal and the new deal as, um, you know, divergent in some way. But the new deal is the new deal. And the green new deal is like the environmental new deal, but I wasn't around for it, obviously none of us were, but the new deal itself was a green new deal. If you look at the mass ecological devastation that was happening with the, uh, the dust bowl and the, uh, what was it called there, there was even, um, there was a phenomenon where top soil was carried by winds all the way into cities,
Speaker 4 00:28:37 Soil erosion, and the federal project to restore it.
Speaker 5 00:28:41 They th there were like black twisters that brought such polluted dust that people have respiratory elements in cities from the top soil being carried all the way from the bread basket to the urban centers. And so really in a lot of ways, the original new deal was a green new deal. It was the response to an ecological disaster.
Speaker 2 00:29:00 Maybe I'm getting this, uh, sense that, uh, behind what we're talking about here with the green new deal is in fact relevant to how we deal with the democratic party, because this is the banner of the democratic party it's been for, for 80 years now, but should be. And so the green new deal is part of that history. It's a continuation of that history.
Speaker 5 00:29:25 And, um, Biden is calling himself what an FDR Democrat. Now it strains my imagination to hear that sentence, but, uh, it really does give a good indication of where the, uh, kind of, um, mythology of the democratic party lies. I heard something random about the civilian conservation Corps, but about a year ago, which is half of all trees alive today are a result of that tree planting project. Wow. Okay. I didn't realize quite how many trees they planted.
Speaker 4 00:29:57 I I'd like to shift in, um, a little bit and ask, um, uh, as maybe leading towards a wrap up, like, w w what do you think in terms of strategy and tactics? You, you worked for example, on the Senate race for Kevin Daley owned here in California. Um, I know that you, you guys, as an organization are engaging in a lot of primaries, but, um, in addition to primary battles, what are some, some tactics and strategies that you think, um, progressives can be using to either move or change the democratic party?
Speaker 5 00:30:35 Um, I think one thing that we approached actually around this time last year, that feels like a new tactic to me, although I, you know, I'm not claiming that no one's done it before, uh, was targeting the DNC directly, um, specifically all of the voting members of the DNC and particularly the members of the, was it the platform? It wasn't the platform committee. I can't remember what committee it was, but, um, actually got a resolution passed through that committee to have external climate debates. Uh, and that of course got shut down when, uh, Tom Perez called it to a floor vote, which is, I hear a little irregular, very irregular, but, um, but, uh, you know, for our first time trying that tactic, we felt like it went pretty well. And, and what it made us realize in talking to all of those, uh, representatives is that, you know, a lot of the DNC operates in a way that's not publicly visible and they're not used to public pressure.
Speaker 5 00:31:35 Um, one of the DNC members actually from up in Minnesota had said that he was on the opposite side of this issue, and he got so many calls from people talking to him about the importance of climate change in their lives and this issue that he ended up switching. So I think that's a lot easier than say a, you know, a Congress person that has a secretary or, you know, someone whose job it is to take their calls and then ignore them. Right. And, uh, you know, DNC members, I feel like really are much more in some ways, uh, connected to pressure in that way. So I think targeting the DNC is one, and then, uh, local government is another strong place where like a lot, a lot of races are just uncontested in local government and even races that you don't think apply to your issue, whatever it is, you know, climate or healthcare. Now, it seems like probably do. Yeah. If you care about criminal justice, like wow, school board is actually really important. Um, I mean, that's still technically a primary, but like races that are not really typically non-registered non-executive braces
Speaker 2 00:32:51 In his interview. We talked about the fact that the majority of Democrats in a state like California are very receptive, if not even very enthusiastic and committed to fundamental structural policy changed green new deal. Single-payer things that Bernie Sanders called socialists democratic socialism. That's true. And that's something that we act upon. We were progressive activists, but the problem is the electorate registered Democrats, those who lean Democrat vote, Democrat include people who are supposedly more moderate or centrist, or have mixed views or conflicting even their own internal conflict about a lot of ideological things. So politicians that are operating in swing districts and close to districts who are needing to appeal to people who are not registered Democrats in order to win the majority in their district, they're caught in the, uh, in terms of where they can stand politically and ideologically. This is sort of obvious. And yet often, uh, it's painted by critics on the left as simply a matter of courage. If you had courage, you would be more principled. They might say, this is a problem, not just in this country at this time, it's a problem of within any majority barium political party in a democratic electoral system that I'm aware of, how do you build electoral coalitions to get elected? And where does the left fit into that?
Speaker 4 00:34:33 We are starting to evoke WebVR and Michelle's and everyone who told us a hundred years ago and Maura, right. To be not to expect too, too much from a political party, that's trying to win a majority and get elected. It'll start to have its own interest as an institution. And as you say exactly right, but every individual, I mean, if you think about this, you have there's over 300,000 elected offices in the United States. And in every single one of them, if you had a progressive person there, they're trying to get to 50% plus one, or, you know, 30%, if it's, uh, one of these weird at-large races that people have for city council, but there's some numbers and percentage of the electorate, they got to get to, to win or to win reelection. And at the end of the day, they're really on their own in terms of raising the money to do that in terms of doing the work and, and getting some, you know, some professionals or, you know, people with skills and experience to help them do it.
Speaker 4 00:35:32 And sometimes there's a party organization there to help them also, but that's not even really the norm. So then with all of those things like together, those individual people are going to have to be making decisions to the best that they can about what's going to get them a majority and keep them a majority. So what might seem really obvious that, you know, everyone should be for the green new deal and for, you know, collective bargaining rights for every worker or, you know, and for higher taxes on the rich, if you're running for city council unaided by any kind of organization, you just want to do good rather than bad, it's pretty hard for you to like go out and necessarily be perfect on all of those issues all out on your own.
Speaker 2 00:36:23 So, right. But the dynamic van is maybe more at the level of changing people at the grass roots or mobilizing people at the grassroots, then being very accusatory toward politicians. Of course, there are, there are times you would really want to denounce politics politicians, uh, and you want to get rid of them and you want to replace them, but sometimes you gotta, sometimes you gotta, but, uh, and, and so these are matters usually as you're indicating left to people in the, in the community about what they think of so-and-so, who's holding down an office. When you realize, as we've talked about last episode in 1960, as a young activist, we were dealing with the democratic party whose large portion of which was controlled and led by white supremacists. Right? And our goal was to get them out of the party. And the point being that social movements are intimately connected to the party, uh, even if they are not participating in its machinery because of their impact on the electorate, to which the democratic party is trying to reach out that's right. And trying to figure out that inter interaction between the movement in the grass roots, who may or may not be electorally or oriented at any given time and the party itself.
Speaker 4 00:37:49 I think one of the things is to understand that just behaving like a party. So, you know, having people run for office and say, Hey, I'm a Democrat and people in the electorate thinking, Hey, being a Democrat means a certain set of basic things. Pro-labor, pro-environment feminist, what have you. And so I'm going to vote for that person. They say, they're a Democrat. Um, and then go, and then they go into office and they behave more or less like that. Like that process that we kind of take for granted is so important for democracy. It's so important for empowering the voter for being able to imp impact policy and not just have a competition between charismatic individuals to try to get jobs in government. Right. I mean, that's, that's what a totally nonpartisan politics would be. Um, you know, it'd be like a high school election.
Speaker 4 00:38:43 So the, at their very basic, what parties do is like bring politics and policy into elections and everything in American politics is basically set up to be hostile to that in the political culture. There's this like, idea that the really cool politician is a Maverick who will just like, backstab their fellow party members, every chance they get, like that's a really good politician. And then a non-partisan across the, the aisles is just, you know, this is like this, that fetishized space, but then also on the left where like anti partisan, like I'm not a member of a party, I think for myself. And I could never see myself in the same party as, you know, whoever Nancy Pelosi or, or Hillary Clinton, whoever, whoever the, the bugbear is at the time. But the point being that there's so many ways that makes just that simple operation of Hey, to be a Democrat is means that I should vote, like in general, along with my fellow Democrats.
Speaker 4 00:39:43 And, and that's how we like mobilize and build trust in the electorate just doing that takes a ton of work. And unfortunately, I think Progressive's expect that that work will happen somehow someone will do it. And then Progressive's job is to just kind of like stand on the outside and throw in bombs of truth. But the fact is like just doing that, like making the party function as a party and be consistent, takes activism and takes leadership and takes networking and takes organizing. And so I've found that as a progressive it's like in the party that I split my time between, you know, just building the party and maintaining against it, maintaining it against all the forces that want there to not be parties in a way while also moving it left and, and, and having the fights over ideas and issues and policies,
Speaker 2 00:40:37 I would throw into what you just said about the nature of the structure of the party. It's not only having the party act like a party with coherence, but having that based on democratic participation. Right.
Speaker 4 00:40:50 Excellent point. Yeah. And, and that's, that's the difference between, you know, you and I have talked a lot about E shot Schneider and that generation of fifties political scientists, and they were very smart. He in particular was very smart about pointing out how important parties are, you know, in the ecology of democracy, so to speak and the competition between them being so important for having a democratic society. He didn't give a crap, frankly, whether the parties were internally democratic. I do. Um, and that's the other piece, right? Is like the part of being engaged in the party is also a reform effort. Like it should be about finding those spaces in the party that are participatory and defending them and them against the model that the consultants and a lot of electeds would like, which is every party activist is a, is a resource to be mobilized and asset to be put on a chess board, not somebody to tell me how to vote, right?
Speaker 2 00:41:48 So maybe we need to wind this particular episode up, but I want us to come back to a point we started to talk about in the first episode about party's relationship to corporate influence. And this was clearly central to what Mathias and we were discussing when, when he was on. And it may be that maybe the one way to define the battle or a key wave from here on is which Democrats find themselves very comfortably allied with ruling class power. You might say with wall street or banks or corporations, uh, either in their particular locality or nationally. And whether that is a dividing line, that might really Claire, if we focused on that would be a way of clarifying what the battle is in the coming period within the party. This is a theme we're going to keep coming back to, but, uh, it may be one of the keys to understanding the democratic party in the past. And now from the point of view of certain people on the left, the party is inescapably totally. And by definition, a party of the corporate class, I don't think you, and I agree with that.
Speaker 4 00:43:06 I think it's inescapably anything. And, you know, and it was why I tried to frame all of this and talking about the, the, the age, the rickety newness of this institution, it's been a lot of things in its career. It was inescapably the party of segregation and the, the, and white supremacy that's right. But as you pointed out, right, people got to work and put in a lot of literal blood, sweat, and tears to, to change that about the party. And I think that's right. That one way we could frame the current need for realignment of the party is to realign it away from corporate power. Um, not just in terms of, Hey, here's money. So vote with us, which is part of the dynamic, but also the lack of imagination for being able to think of, of economic policy and social policy that isn't market focused. So could the corporations and corporate thinking and neo-liberalism to use a loaded phrase or a loaded term. That definitely is one way to look at a dividing line within the,
Speaker 0 00:44:09 I know millions, Mister, I know diamond ring Ziarat Deliv. Mr. Give me a bad job. That's our show for now.
Speaker 2 00:44:33 You've been listening to talking strategy, making history. The first season of which we call a Hitchhiker's guide to the democratic party tonight was one installment. You'll be hearing more weeks to come. You can support us and get exclusive full interviews with our guests at patrion.com/tsm H patriot.com/t S M H. See you next time.
