The DNC and RNC represent the American Ancien Régime
“…when a living want of mankind has got itself officially protected and organized in an institution, one of the things which the institution most surely tends to do is to stand in the way of the natural gratification of the want itself”—William James
We can see this in action in our institutionalized political parties, which have both acted to directly impede democracy and the will of the people. At a basic level, the profit motive itself has demanded compromises within the parties which have left them unable to operate in accordance with their stated principles.
Bush V Gore is both an apex of corruption for its time and a canary in the coal mine for our own. A New York Times article from November 2001 asserts in the headline that the Supreme Court didn’t cast the deciding ballot and Bush would have won anyway, only to report several paragraphs deep, “ looking at a broader group of rejected ballots than those covered in the court decisions, 175,010 in all, found that Mr. Gore might have won if the courts had ordered a full statewide recount of all the rejected ballots.”
Another article from earlier in April 2001 presents the data the same way. Crowing about an “Analysis favorable to Bush” in the headline; then “On the other hand, the Herald reported that the balance would have tipped to Vice President Al Gore if a recount of the undervotes had been started from scratch in all 67 Florida counties using the most inclusive standards.”
Not only did Gore win the popular vote; if all the votes in Florida had been counted, he won the electoral college.
The RNC and DNC have been changing rules for decades to keep candidates with enthusiastic public support from winning elections. In 2012, before the GOP convention in Tampa, Ron Paul had won enough delegates to speak at the convention. Prior to Ron Paul’s candidacy, the condition to qualify for a spot on the convention stage was a plurality of delegates from 5 or more states, which Paul had accomplished. Mitt Romney didn’t want to share a stage with Paul, so the RNC changed the rule, from five states to eight states. For good measure, to even speak at the convention, the RNC required Paul to prostrate himself by submitting to the editing of his speech and an endorsement of Mitt Romney.
Four years later, only Trump had met the eight-state threshold by the convention, clearing the way for his nomination. Now in 2022, the RNC has completely abandoned the pretense of neutrality to put its infrastructure behind Trump. “We can change the bylaws,” said RNC committeewoman Michele Fiore at a winter meeting. Anticipating the boring disaster that Trump is in a substantive debate format, RNC presidential candidates are now barred from participating in presidential debates.
The RNC completely abandoned any vision of a party without Trump, in part to cynically use him to rake in as much money as possible. Trump tried to use the money he generates for the party as leverage to stop Republicans from opposing him, but the RNC doesn’t take his protests seriously. Trump doesn’t take his words seriously either, so it’s fair.
The cash bonanza that Trump has been for the RNC and GOP state legislators is facilitated entirely by the 2014 Supreme Court decision on McCutcheon vs. FEC that removed limits on how much an individual donor can give to candidates. Samuel Alito asked at the time,“ How realistic is it that all of the state party committees, for example, are going to get money and they’re all going to transfer it to one candidate?”.
Pretty realistic, Hilary Clinton demonstrated. Her campaign was the first to take advantage of the loophole in 2016 and the Biden campaign used the loophole in 2020. This is just the way campaign finance is now, any donation to a candidate can be used by the political party or shifted to a state government as necessary. Donating to any entity in the chain divorces your money from any cause or person you may have in mind.
In the year 2017, while Trump was using the word “rigged” like toilet paper, Donna Brazile published a book that described a fundraising 2015 agreement Clinton made with the DNC. “The agreement…specified that in exchange for raising money and investing in the DNC, Hillary would control the party’s finances, strategy, and all the money raised. Her campaign had the right of refusal of who would be the party communications director, and it would make final decisions on all the other staff. The DNC also was required to consult the campaign about all other staffing, budgeting, data, analytics, and mailings.”
Brazile also described the palpable juxtaposition of enthusiasm between Clinton and Sanders. Enthusiasm can’t be bought.
A Wikileaks dump provided a lot of context to the 2016 election and still offers insights into present-day strategies. The pied piper strategy was revealed by Wikileaks. The strategy consists of elevating the wackiest far-right candidate in the race to make the neoliberal centrist seem more sane and rational by comparison. The strategy backfired spectacularly but continues to be employed in subsequent elections. The problem is that neoliberalism is a zombie ideology, it has nothing of value to offer the electorate. It’s very telling that Republicans also elevate economically neoliberal Democrats.
The Wikileaks emails also revealed conversations about building narratives against Sanders to plant in the press. At the time, the Democratic nominee was decided by “superdelegates” a creation of the party elite to safeguard the country from a candidate who had the enthusiastic support of voters. Beyond all the corruption that came to light in 2017, by February of 2016, it was obvious that the nomination contest wasn’t a contest at all. The DNC changed the rules around superdelegates in 2018, but in 2020 it was clear that the same systemic issues existed. This is because the intention of the superdelegate system was always to shift power from the voters to the party establishment. Superdelegates are fundamentally undemocratic, created to obstruct the will of the people.
All of this sets up any candidate to forfeit their integrity to contest the obvious. Sanders protested the claim that the process was rigged in 2020 with “not currently”. Donna Brazile told the RNC chairwoman to “Go to Hell” for making the same claims Brazile was making a few years earlier in her book.
A group of Sanders supporters filed a class action lawsuit against the DNC and Debbie Wasserman Schultz to get official admission of wrongdoing and some restitution to Sander’s supporters who spent millions of dollars on his preemptively doomed campaign. The DNC defended itself by arguing that the words “impartial” and “evenhanded” in their charter are rules they can apply at their discretion, rules they “didn’t need to adopt to begin with”. They made the case that Sanders supporters knew the election was rigged all along, so the DNC can’t be responsible. A lawyer for the DNC literally said the DNC could “go into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the candidate that way”.
Judge William Zloch ultimately dismissed the case for being outside the jurisdiction of the court. The case moved all the way up to the Supreme Court, which decided against taking it up in 2020. The DNC apologized to the Sanders campaign in 2016, which in light of their legal defense and ongoing actions was as cynically insincere as it’s possible to be.
The rampant fraud that brought the financial system of the country to the brink of insolvency in 2008 demonstrated that the economic principles the country had been organized around were flat-earth-level bullshit. The idea that markets are self-organizing to prevent fraud, so regulation of novel financial instruments was unnecessary, was completely false. The idea that the profit motive leads to virtue and benefit for all via a perverse interpretation of Smith’s invisible hand metaphor is now permanently indefensible. The concepts of a “free market” that 2008 exposed; too big to fail multinationals aren’t in need of emergency antitrust action; corporations have more rights and fewer responsibilities than citizens; legislators can be compromised to cede their power to the wealthy; these concepts proved that neoliberalism has always been a shallow intellectual veneer for an ideology more aptly called “Rich People Bitching”.
The majority of people don’t believe in it anymore. A politician who tells people that universal health care is not possible or that wages are the cause of inflation simply won’t be taken seriously. Someone who promises chaos with lunatic ravings about space lasers is more likely to get support than someone promising more of the same wealth and justice inequality. This has all happened already.
Peter Drucker’s first book, the End of Economic Man, details the rise of fascist totalitarianism in Germany and Italy. Drucker offers a more insightful understanding than most because his analysis isn’t superficial or materialist. Because of his focus on the inner mindset, he observed the Nazi rise to power as a result of the failures of the economic systems of the time to foster freedom and equality; the steadfast refusal of the established powers to change. He describes the hopelessness people felt, the lack of belief in any recovery, and subsequent longing for chaos to upend the system. Chaos was what Donald Trump was selling, and what many of his voters were buying.
Since 2008 there have been increasing numbers of voters who want fundamental radical change to the system. Anyone telling voters that they can’t have universal health care because of the money that these industries are pumping into their party coffers doesn’t deserve power at all. Anyone telling Wall Street that nothing will fundamentally change will see themselves proven a liar as they unwittingly enable fascism and totalitarianism.
Drucker wrote, “Only too often they refuse to admit unassailable evidence and cling instead to wishful thinking in a way pathetically reminiscent of the self-deception in which all the ancien regimes have indulged in order to conceal that they had actually died. And this self-deception of the advocates of the old order has always helped the new revolutionary forces more than their own victories”.
The old order is the political parties. In their institutionalization, they have been directly impeding their purported cause, by their own admission. Compromises to the integrity of the system in order to retain power, for financial reasons, or as personal favors, have aggregated to an outcome wherein the parties themselves are directly harmful to the well-being of the country.
Currently, there is a lot of fear over the Supreme Court agreeing to hear the Moore v. Harper case out of North Carolina. The case will decide on the independent state legislator doctrine; whether state governments can have final authority over voters and state courts in gerrymandering cases and other election oversight. Three Sitting Justices worked on the Bush V. Gore case. The Court’s conservative majority has so far ruled with very specious logic to justify a swath of decisions that overturn long-established precedent, endanger the country, and are guaranteed to impoverish the country.