Conversation

Notices

1. Embed this notice
   Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Saturday, 11-Jan-2025 07:16:50 JST Cory Doctorow

   Back in 2017, the Democratic National Committee's lawyers submitted a legal brief that didn't just say the quiet part out loud; they *bellowed* it: "[The DNC can] go into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the [presidential] candidate that way":

   https://observer.com/2017/05/dnc-lawsuit-presidential-primaries-bernie-sanders-supporters/

   --

   If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

   https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/10/smoke-filled-room-where-it-happens/#dinosaurs

   1/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Saturday, 11-Jan-2025 07:17:17 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     The brief was submitted in the lawsuit between Bernie Sanders and the DNC. Sanders sued over the DNC changing the rules midway through 2016 process in order to sideline him and give the nomination to Hillary Clinton. The DNC's response boiled down to, "Sure, we cheated. So what? We, the committee, are ultimately answerable only to ourselves, and we can choose *anyone* to lead the party into any election."

     2/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Saturday, 11-Jan-2025 07:17:31 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     The DNC is a weak institution, in other words. There's a universe in which that would be OK. After all, there's a lot of overhead that comes with making strong institutions, all those checks and balances and oversight and transparency soak up resources that you could be using to do *other stuff*.

     3/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Saturday, 11-Jan-2025 07:17:40 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     In an ideal world, a badly run Democratic Party would be spurred to improve after it lost elections, which would result in the defenestration of bad party bosses and the ouster of bad candidates:

     https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/30/weak-institutions/

     But the US political system is not an ideal world. In the real world, it's possible for party bosses who pursue disastrous strategies that result in key electoral losses to remain in power.

     4/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Saturday, 11-Jan-2025 07:17:48 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     The Democratic Party still rakes in massive donations from people who hate Trump more than they hate the Democratic Party's incompetence. Candidates in gerrymandered safe seats can be wildly incompetent and still hold onto power for improbably long timescales, despite the manifest evidence of their total unfitness for office:

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Lipinski

     5/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Saturday, 11-Jan-2025 07:17:57 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     In the absence of real consequences for corruption, incompetence and utter moral turpitude, the Democratic National Committee needs some other form of discipline to get it into fighting form. We need to occupy the DNC, strengthen its institutional safeguards, and turn it into an election-winning, fascism-fighting, extinction-rebelling, worker-defending powerhouse.

     6/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Saturday, 11-Jan-2025 07:18:07 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Three weeks from now, the DNC will meet in National Harbor MD to elect its new president and officers. Who gets to vote on that? The 448 members of the party's national committee. Who are they? As Micah Sifry writes for *The American Prospect*, it's a secret, even to the committee members:

     https://prospect.org/politics/2025-01-10-opening-dncs-black-box/

     7/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Saturday, 11-Jan-2025 07:18:15 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     No, really. While nominally, members can request a list of their fellow members, the DNC stalls and stonewalls and does everything it can to prevent the committee from communicating in any way they can't control. This is incredible, but it's true. Which is why Sifry has published a leaked list of all 448 members:

     https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bQKIP3W1NWChRjSbsE0O5k5s7OdgXrJi5-CMfFECIBU/edit?gid=0#gid=0

     8/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Saturday, 11-Jan-2025 07:18:23 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     Looking at the spreadsheet of members, we get a rare glimpse inside the Democratic sausage factory. There's te 73 "at large" members who were voted on as a single block after being handpicked by outgoing president Jaime Harrison. These members are a mix of great people and terrible people, and that's by design: it meant that Sanders and Warren voters could only get their people onto the committee if they voted for some of the most disgusting corporate shills you can imagine.

     9/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Saturday, 11-Jan-2025 07:18:34 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     The fact that the national committee's membership is secret and their communications must pass through a DNC chokepoint means that they get up to all *kinds* of shenanigans, like at the 2023 summer meeting where they voted themselves the power to throw out any bylaw amendments passed at a national party convention.

     10/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Saturday, 11-Jan-2025 07:18:48 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     The vote was whipped by paid DNC staff, creating an atmosphere so poisonous that Jessica Chambers (a rep from Wyoming) called the DNC "the least democratic organization that I’m involved with."

     Sifry's breakdown is really useful: he identifies the minority of members who are elected by the party rank-and-file, calling them "the people most responsive to what the base of the party cares about."

     11/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Saturday, 11-Jan-2025 07:18:55 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     He also calls out the corporate shills who "buckrake as lobbists," like Donna Brazile, "a partner at “corporate reputation strategy firm.”

     But even where state party organizations have elections for their committee members, some states keep the results of those elections a secret. Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania have 69 members, but the identities of all but 14 of them are a secret.

     12/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Saturday, 11-Jan-2025 07:19:01 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     This is a rotten institution, and that's by design. If you want to know why we can't have nice things - or, you know, a world that's not on fire and haunted by creeping fascism - this is why. The takeover of the DNC won't be easy, but it can't start until we know who the DNC *is*.

     13/

   • Embed this notice
     Cory Doctorow (pluralistic@mamot.fr)'s status on Saturday, 11-Jan-2025 07:19:12 JST Cory Doctorow

     in reply to

     *Picks and Shovels* is a new, standalone technothriller starring Marty Hench, my two-fisted, hard-fighting, tech-scam-busting forensic accountant. You can pre-order it on my latest Kickstarter, which features a brilliant audiobook read by Wil Wheaton:

     http://martinhench.com

     eof/

   • Embed this notice
     Extinction Studies (aka_quant_noir@hcommons.social)'s status on Saturday, 11-Jan-2025 07:40:17 JST Extinction Studies

     in reply to

     @pluralistic

     Of the four Nebraska reps, I know one (or knew), and know who the chair is. Ron Kaminski, not so much. Seems like an operator.