A few days ago I wrote about popular constitutionalism and Slate’s new podcast series on that topic. This is a critical civic topic because it is probably the only and certainly the proper path back from systemic corruption of the current Supreme Court and the broader problem of judicial supremacy. (If this is fuzzy or if it’s unclear what I’m talking about see that earlier post.) But what that Slate discussion quickly arrived at is that to have that kind of popular constitutionalism, the ability of the people to make decisions about what the U.S. Constitution requires or forbids, you need robust and functioning political parties. And one of the key features of American politics over the last 50 years is that parties really don’t exist anymore in the sense they did for upwards of a century and a half in American politics.
That story about American political parties isn’t a new one. It goes back to what was at least then seen as the democratizing trend of the 1960s and the creation of the modern party primary system. Smoke-filled rooms were out, and democratic primaries were in. This had the effect of making the parties into loose institutional apparatuses that had little decision-making power. The new model was the entrepreneurial political candidate who raised money and established a personal brand that could be ratified in a primary. (At best a campaign gets a lot of supporters revved up, working phones, knocking doors. But once the campaign is over those integuments, relationships and experience disappear like a brain dying when it deprived of oxygen.) When a presidential candidate wins a primary and then a general election, they effectively take possession of the national party apparatus. A major in-state elected official might do something like this at the state level. But in general, there is no Democratic Party. There’s just a loose set of structures that might be under the temporary control of key elected officials. These trends were then heavily exaggerated by Court-driven loosening of campaign finance rules which made big donors the effective powers behind the political parties.
I spend a huge amount of time explaining to people that there is really no such thing as the Democratic National Committee in the sense of something that controls anything, that can find better candidates, head off bad candidates or do anything else. The House and the Senate committees have a bit more heft and existence. But these are almost entirely donor-powered operations and, critically, they’re run by and behalf of their respective caucuses. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) is owned and operate by Senate Democrats, who are trying to get themselves back into the majority and — at least secondarily — are looking for people they want to serve with.
So we need popular, democratic institutions to revitalize democratic, civic action. But we are in an anti-elite, anti-institutional age. Any institution that can exert power starts with at least two strikes against it. Of course, we can square some of this circle by noting that the party committees aren’t even supposed to be popular or democratic organizations. They’re campaign committees run by and on behalf of incumbents. The Democratic Party could be something like this. But it’s not. It’s mainly the creature of incumbent presidents and sort of no one when a party is out of power. This is why you mainly shouldn’t care whatever its “2024 autopsy” says.
The closest thing you have to bottom-up institutions or organizations that are vehicles for popular democratic actions are groups like Indivisible, which have chapters across the country and are again and again at the forefront when you see today examples of grassroots mobilization. I often come back to Indivisible because I think they are remarkably underrepresented in public debates these days relative to the centrality of their activism — whether it’s organizing turnout at town halls, door-knocking campaigns, anti-ICE mobilizations and a million other things. But it’s not like Indivisible has or wants a monopoly on this kind of activism. Just a moment ago I was watching a video about a new group doing campaign work for progressive campaigns in the Great Lakes states. A more ideological variant. But with the same mass base, institution-building concept.
An earlier version of this were the Democratic clubs which were ubiquitous in the mid-century United States, especially in big cities. They were usually reformist in nature and tended to be alternative structures to the big city machines, which in some cases had a certain kind of mass basis but were mostly run on patronage. Those clubs still exist in New York City, for instance. But they’re a shadow of their former selves.
In any case, there is at least a tension here between the need to build mass-base democratic organizations and the harsh anti-institutional age we live in. In theory there’s no necessary contradiction. In practice, there is. We live in an age of atomization and rage. Organization and institution-building is the path back.