The real source of the Democratic Party’s failure is insipid, institutional and inexorable

Kamala Harris. Nancy Pelosi. Gavin Newsome. Pete Buttigeg. The face of the Democratic Party. A bunch of losers with no appeal unless you're among a relatively uniform segment of American society: namely, college educated, from a big city, and obsessed with diversity and identity politics to the detriment of considerations like economic wellbeing. (This isn't anything new in the way criticism).

I'm beginning to think the only way to explain why the Democratic Party has the priorities that it does it not to look to the candidates themselves but to go deeper and into the anodyne space is that is organisational analysis. Who is the Democratic Party, who runs it, how are decisions made? In particular, what goes on at the Democratic National Committee.

I don't know a single person that works there. I don't know anything about it really other than that it is the controlling organ of the national party comprised of a chair, an executive committee and then a national management team. And that despite the party being "decentralised" in its management and governance, that the DNC has consolidated power over the regional governing bodies since Obama.

I am reasonably confident that nearly everyone that holds an iota of managerial discretion in the DNC adopts a very cookie-cutter set of beliefs: diversity of identity is the paramount priority of politics and is an end unto itself, civility in politics is necessary, there are many Americans that vote against their own interests and it is possible to scold them into realising this, "journalism" and broadcast media really are the fourth estate and people believe what they see, and so on. (I do not believe you would find anything resembling ideological uniformity in the Republican Party, though strongly suspect something similar is at play in the UK Labour Party, but which has always been a top-down organisation).

Importantly these are not elected people. They are careerists. To be hired it is a precondition to evidence that you possess the same values in the same way that for profit companies screen for values like entrepreneurship.

Because the DNC has consolidated power since Obama and because it is staffed with self-same managers, from an organisational perspective, the DNC is incapable of changing its approach to sourcing and fielding candidates. As in, there is nothing overseeing the DNC's own decisionmaking as informed by their ideological convictions aside from a complex feedback loop between the DNC and the elected elite (the names above at the top).

I don't know how it's possible to challenge this system short of some sort of organic self-realisation that happens at the top. But in my experience, people at the top are reluctant to admit mistakes because they prioritise their own self-continuance over the longer-term ability of the organisation to thrive. Presumably this explains why 2016, 2020 and 2024 presidential election strategies employed similar tactics: focus on the civility politics, focus on the threat to democracy rather than economic wellbeing. It's a losing strategy, with 2020's success being an aberration probably due to COVID.

I think the only way to change the values of the Democratic Party and to revitalise the candidates it runs nationally is to effectively decapitate the DNC. But as an unaccountable organisation, it is difficult to do this.

Ideas welcome.