What Do You Think-- Should We Make The Democratic Party More Democratic?

I just got off the phone being interviewed by a journalist for GQ about how punk bands fought off Nazi sympathizers from the suburbs who couldn't understand the concept of irony and got uncomfortably serious about fascism. The Dead Kennedys, The Clash, Black Flag are the best known among them early on and soon after, Green Day embraced the mantle. We ended the conversation by me introducing him to Green Day fan and anti-fascism warrior Randy Bryce, you know, to kind of push the discussion into a related, if not obvious, direction.

Bernie wrote a long essay for his followers this week and I'm going to share it in moment but I want to set it up first by urging you to read a Matt Taibbi piece in Rolling Stone first, Why Donna Brazile's Story Matters-- But Not for the Reason You Might Think. His subtitle: "Everyone knew the primary was rigged. The real question is: Why did they bother, when they would have won anyway?" He's not happy about the virtual lynching of Brazile by the online Clinton dead enders who refuse to ever go away and live to destroy the Democratic Party.

The story among other things described how the national Clinton campaign used funds that by rule should have redounded to state Democratic Party offices.

Politico described this situation back then as "essentially… money laundering."

...[T]he idea that Brazile's book amounted to a smoking gun that the primary was "rigged" against Sanders is "problematic" in its own right, for two reasons:

1) That the DNC had things stacked against Sanders from the start wasn't secret. After all, the DNC wouldn't even let Sanders use their headquarters as a venue to announce his candidacy, way back in April of 2015. As the book Shattered explains it, DNC officials felt it was inappropriate to "give Sanders the imprimatur of the party." He made his announcement on a strip of grass outside the Capitol. He was never treated by the DNC as a real candidate, not from the first minute of his campaign.

2) But it didn't matter! Clinton would almost certainly have won the nomination anyway. As her proponents have repeatedly pointed out, the race wasn't that close. Even as a Sanders supporter, I concede this.

But that is what's so weird. Why bother monkeying around with rules, when you're going to win anyway?

Why not welcome Sanders and the energy he undoubtedly would (and did) bring into the party, rather than scheme to lock him and others out?

There are a lot of people who are going to wonder why so much time is being spent re-litigating the 2016 campaign. It sucked, it's over: Who cares?

It does matter. That race is when many of the seeds of what will be the defining problems of our age first began to be sown.

The rise of Trump and the crypto-fascist movement that crushed establishment Republicans is half of the story. The sharp move among many white middle American voters away from Beltway Republicanism toward something far darker and more dangerous crystalized in 2015-16. So it has to be studied over and over.

But there is an ugly thing on the other side that also began at that time.

This is when establishment Democrats began to openly lose faith in democracy and civil liberties and began to promote a "results over process" mode of political thinking. It's when we started hearing serious people in Washington talk about the dangers of "too much democracy."

This isn't about Hillary Clinton. It's about a broader movement that took place within the Democratic establishment, and spread rapidly to blue-friendly media and academia.

It's a kind of repeat of post-9/11 thinking, when suddenly huge pluralities of Americans decided the stakes were now too high to continue being queasy about things like torture, extralegal assassination, and habeas corpus.

In the age of Trump, we're now throwing all sorts of once-treasured principles-- press ethics, free speech, freedom from illegal surveillance-- overboard, because the political stakes are now deemed too high to cede ground to Trump over principles.

But this distrust of democracy began before Trump was even a nominee. As Brazile notes, it started within the ranks of the Democratic Party near the outset of the campaign.

It would have been a huge boon to Clinton's run if the DNC had welcomed not only Sanders but other serious candidates into the race, in the true spirit of what the primary process is supposed to represent-- the winnowing of many diverse views into one unified message.

But the attitude in Washington is now the opposite. Primary challengers are increasingly seen as reprobates who exist only to bloody the "real" candidate. So they should be kept down and discouraged whenever possible.

As the campaign continued, and we saw both Trump's rise and results like Brexit, the "too much democracy" argument began to emerge even more, along with the embrace of techniques that would have horrified true liberals a generation ago.

In the last year, we've seen the blue-state establishment celebrate the use of the infamous FISA statute against American citizens, and the use of warrantless electronic surveillance against the same.

We've seen the ACLU denounced for defending free speech and we've seen sites like Buzzfeed celebrated for publishing unverified and/or slanderous material, usually because the targets are politically unpopular.

Liberals used not to believe in doing these things not only because they understood that they would likely be the first victims in a society stripped of civil protections (a school district forcing the removal of Black Lives Matter stickers is a classic example of a more probable future in a world without civil liberties).

No, they eschewed these tactics because they genuinely believed that debate, discussion, inclusion and democracy brought out the best in us.

The point of the Brazile story isn't that the people who "rigged" the primary were afraid of losing an election. It's that they weren't afraid of betraying democratic principles, probably because they didn't believe in them anymore.

If you're not frightened by the growing appeal of that line of thinking, you should be. There is a history of this sort of thing. And it never ends well.

That's where Taibbi ends and Bernie begins. "People are hurting in this country," he wrote, "and our job is not to be distracted by political gossip and Donald Trump's tweets. Our job is to revitalize American democracy and bring millions of people into the political process who today do not vote and who do not believe that government is relevant to their lives. Our job is to create an economy and government that works for all of us, not just the 1 percent and wealthy campaign contributors." He was just getting warmed up, believe me...

Here's the problem: the strategy the Democratic Party has been pursuing in recent years has failed. Since 2009, Democrats have lost more than 1,000 seats in state legislatures across the country. Republicans now control the White House, 34 out of 50 governorships as well as the U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate. In dozens of states, the Democratic Party is virtually non-existent. Too much is at stake for our country and our people for us not to learn from our past failures and move forward in a way that makes the Democratic Party stronger so we can take on and beat Trump and the right-wing Republican agenda.

What the recently released book excerpt from former interim DNC Chair Donna Brazile made clear is that unless we get our act together, we are not going to be effective in either taking on Donald Trump or in stopping the extremist right-wing Republican agenda. We have to re-establish faith with the American people that in fact we can make positive changes in this country through a fair and transparent political process that reflects the will of voters across this country.

In order to do that, we need to rethink and rebuild the Democratic Party. We need a Democratic Party that opens its doors to new people, new energy and new ideas. We need a Democratic Party that is truly a grassroots party, where decisions are made from the bottom up, not from the top down. We need a Democratic Party which becomes the political home of the working people and young people of this country, black and white, Latino and Asian and Native American ... all Americans.

And we need to make it abundantly clear that the Democratic Party is prepared to take on the ideology of the Koch brothers and the billionaire class-- a small group of people who are undermining American democracy and moving this country into an oligarchic form of society. YES. We will take on the greed, recklessness and illegal behavior of Wall Street, corporate America, the insurance industry, the drug companies, and the fossil fuel industry.

Now, what the Establishment (political, economic and media) wants us to believe is that real and fundamental changes in our society are impossible.

No. We cannot guarantee health care to all as a right. No. We cannot revitalize the trade union movement, raise the minimum wage to a living wage of $15 an hour and provide pay equity for women. No. We cannot effectively compete in the global economy by making public colleges and universities tuition-free. No. We cannot lead the world in combatting climate change and transforming our energy system away from fossil fuels. No. We cannot reform our broken criminal justice system or finally achieve comprehensive immigration reform.

They want us to think that in the wealthiest country in the history of the world, a nation which has more income and wealth inequality than almost any nation on earth, the best that we can do is to accept tiny, incremental change.

I could not disagree more.

Right now, a Democratic National Committee Unity Reform Commission, comprised of people who supported our campaign, people who supported Secretary Clinton's campaign, and people appointed by DNC Chair Tom Perez are working on a set of policies that will determine the future direction of the Democratic Party. In many ways, this Unity Commission will determine whether the Party goes forward in a dynamic and inclusive way, or whether it retains the failed status quo approach of recent years. It will determine whether the Party will have the grassroots energy to effectively take on Donald Trump, the Republican Party and their reactionary agenda or whether we remain in the minority.

In my view, this Commission must:

• Make the Democratic Party more democratic and the presidential contests more fair by dramatically reducing the number of superdelegates who participate in the nominating process. It is absurd that in the last presidential primary over 700 superdelegates (almost one-third of the delegates a candidate needed to win the nomination) had the power to ignore the will of the people who voted in the state primaries and caucuses.

• Make primaries more open by ending the absurdity of closed primary systems with antiquated, arbitrary and discriminatory voter registration laws. Republicans are the ones who make it harder for people to vote, not Democrats. At a time when more and more people consider themselves to be Independents our job is to bring people into the Democratic Party process, not exclude them. It is incredibly undemocratic that in some states voters must declare their party affiliation up to six months before the primary election.

• Make it easier for working people and students to participate in state caucuses. While there is much to be said for bringing people together face-to-face in a caucus to discuss why they support the candidate of their choice, not everybody is able to attend those caucuses at the time they are held. A process must be developed that gives everyone the right to cast a vote even if they are not physically able to attend a state caucus.

• Make the DNC's budget and decision-making processes more open and transparent. If we are going to build a Party that relies on working people who are willing to give $5, $10 and $27 donations, they deserve to know where that money is going and how those decisions are made.

I look forward to following the progress of the Unity Reform Commission, and I urge Chairman Tom Perez and the entire Democratic National Committee to develop policies which move the Democratic Party forward in a very different direction-- a direction that will lead us to national and statewide victories. It's important that you do the same:

Please sign the petition calling on the Democratic National Committee and Chairman Tom Perez to accept, support and implement policies which make the Democratic Party more inclusive, more democratic and more transparent.

Right now, our job is to come together, and not be distracted by the political gossip and drama of the moment. We must fight President Trump's destructive efforts to divide us up by the color of our skin, our gender, our religion, our sexual orientation or our country of origin. We must rally the American people to oppose Trump's proposal to provide massive tax giveaways to billionaires while taking away the health care that millions now have.

But we must also make it clear-- if we are going to elect Democrats who will move us forward as a country-- that we must institute long-needed reforms in the Democratic Party. When we do that, we will not only create a dynamic and progressive party, we will be able to transform our nation and create a government that represents all of us, not just the people on top.

In solidarity,

Bernie Sanders