The DNC Implodes

Reflections on the Recent DNC Chair Event

I reflect on the rot within the Democratic Party highlighted by the recent shambolic and absurd DNC Chair Election Event.

I’ve often been wrong about American politics (this is probably the most flagrant example).

Politics is a confluence of trends and events and accurate predictions are impossible beyond a certain minimum level of fidelity. However, my main source of error in the past year has been under-estimating how noxious ordinary people would come to find social justice ideology, how quickly the media would lose power and influence (and credibility), and how impotent the Democrats would find their institutional strangleholds and corporate donations to be. In other words, the trends I predicted (the progressive left being completely unable to build a productive and disciplined movement, activism becoming an unpopular and laughable activity among the mainstream, institutions falling to the gridlock and ineffectiveness of ideological capture and elite complacency) have panned out and been even more potent and sudden than I anticipated. I predicted that these trends would play out over 5-10 years and wouldn’t fundamentally upset the political status quo (which is quite powerful, and adaptable). Instead, a red tsunami has crashed over congress and the media and the universities and the wreckage is just now being gone through. I’m sad to report that the Democratic National Committe (DNC) was not among the survivors.

If you’re feeling distracted, or stressed, watch this video (below). It’ll serve as a better-than-SNL burst of comedic relief, and perhaps a reminder that your life is blessed. It’s not so bad. You could be one of the disingenuous leeches sitting on that stage and feeling ridiculous, after all.

The video shows some highlights from the +7 hour (MSNBC Live) Democratic National Committee meeting (several meetings, actually: bylaws announcements, elections for representation, candidate panel discussion, elections for chair and co-chair). These aren’t even the best highlights (or the worst, depending on your outlook). Try to imagine a farcical Leftist parliamentary event. What do you see? Stolen land proclamations? Repeated identity announcements (non-binary, black woman, Afro-Latino, etc.)? Speeches in poorly-vocalized (and incomprehensible) Native American tongues of some kind? Mass confusion over gender quotas and rules? Repeated interruptions (when I say repeated, I mean dozens of complete disruptions) by progressive protesters shouting about the climate and Gaza and billionaire influence and Californian arson? Yes-it had them all.

The Democrats are reeling. I have a few reflections:

1. Despite the popular Leftist idea that rules and merit and police are tainted by WHITE SUPREMACY, they’re all indispensable for the functioning of large social organizations. The universities full of progressive academics who long for police abolition are probably the most well-policed patches of ground in the United States. Parliamentary procedure might have been uncomfortably borrowed from British imperialists (cultural appropriation if I’ve ever seen it) but it’s also a damn fine way to run a meeting. Coercion becomes very useful when people are shouting over your panelists-in fact it’s the only way to respond to people who are determined to interrupt your meeting. It’s also (often) the only way to respond to people determined to rob stores or assault peaceful citizens.

2. Political parties are a strange admixture of ideology, financial incentives, populism, power elites, leadership, and organization. Modern political parties are anchored in ideology. Ideas give them their energy and their organizing principle, although power and money often seem to drive the actual dynamics. The Democrats have a bankrupt ideology. By empowering the loudest victims for years and silencing all dissent they have walked themselves into a narrow memetic corner from which any retreat seems very difficult. They used the crazy activists for many years, but the elites and the pragmatists always retained control. When even those elites drink the kool-aid, though, and come to believe that American society is saturated with white supremacy and misogyny then the party goes off a cliff. Those are simply not popular ideas among most Americans. Tellingly, they’re most popular among richer women with college degrees (not a group known for its hard-headed realism). The Democrats made a devil’s bargain: they used a flammable and emotionally seductive ideology to capture institutions (and used status hierarchies and bullying to maintain that control) but their own leadership was itself captured. The party used activism for decades, but the activist ideas were more attractive than the post-triangulation Democratic coalition of the Clinton era.

   Another way to view it is that finance and concentrated political power threw their weight behind Critical Theory (partly due to sincere belief, but mostly as a cynical bid to manipulate American politics and divide the Left). Critical Theory captured that momentum and used it to infect the DNC, which is now dying. Critical Theory kills institutions. That is its purpose and goal, and it always has been. It’s interesting that the new DNC chair and vice chair are both straight white men, who seem fairly pragmatic, skilled at couching the goals of the activists in the mainstream language of ‘inclusion’ and ‘opportunity.’ Their influence, however, will be limited because it will constantly run up against a party machinery that is, frankly, crazy.

3. There are millions of Americans who maintain harmful addictions for years. They use these compulsions as coping and soothing strategies and let them give shape and purpose to their life. Why would they surrender their favorite thing in the world?

   Addicts generally only make a change when things get so bad that they have lost all personal resources and credibility. “No one goes to rehab on a winning streak” as we say in the recovery community-but it’s even more stark than that: recovery usually must be preceded by total collapse. As long as you still have a home and friends willing to lend you money or a job or an inheritance then you have the will and resources to feed your addiction. Addiction is a loss of control (and a narrowing of the things that give you pleasure and motivation) and so you must lose the absolute ability to feed your addiction before you’re able to change. It’s a sad feature of human psychology but one that I’m very familiar with.

   The Democrats are now addicts. They’ve mostly abandoned the normal and productive goals of a modern political party. They use those issues as cover and use their institutional power to feed their real passions: rewriting the story of America and retooling its institutions to favor their fetishized identity categories (which are, to them, mythical totems, not actual groups of people. More than 60% of Native Americans voted for Trump, yet you still have DNC members giving gibberish speeches at this last event. ‘Indigenous’ and ‘queer’ and ‘BIPOC’ are objects of religious adoration, as separate from the concerns of real people as the dictatorship of the proletariat was from the needs of Russian farmers).

4. The fact that so many Democrats still can’t see the absurdity of their party’s preoccupations is a testament to the remaining power of legacy media, and the stark nature of class divides in America. Millions of educated people still believe that opposition to CRT was driven by racism (for example) because they don’t know any working-class people, black or white. That is a serious social problem.

5. The Democrats will have to experience a total political collapse before they reform themselves. That collapse is underway right now. Normal, loyal Democrats still cleave to their party but without an effective or logical leadership the party will continue to founder, and Trump (and the market, and social disapproval, and the failure of DEI, etc.) is quickly erasing their institutional stranglehold. To predict the rising fortunes of the Democratic Party I would need to know what they were fighting for, what they’re trying to achieve.

If those goals are reflected by this last DNC event (and how could it be otherwise?), they are sunk.

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