Probably one of the best quotes in the article:
How are you going to reform how politics works in this country if you won’t reform how it works inside your own party?
You can’t build movements without breaking things. That entails risk. You will lose some donors, antagonize some interest groups and even alienate some voters.
But nothing could be riskier than our current course. This country is being destroyed from within, and what are we talking about? We don’t need a detailed new policy agenda from Democrats that they can’t implement now and that most people will never read. We don’t need politicians fanning out as awkward guests on podcasts about sports or culture or conspiracy theories.
We need authenticity. We need to know that the party is willing to fight for the things that matter most to people in this country and is unafraid to take on the special interests that are destroying it. Don’t just tell us what policy or program you are for; tell us why you are for it. Show leadership by letting a new generation ascend. Look for people like Andy Kim who are showing courage and creativity in communities. Amplify those voices so there is a resistance that doesn’t feel manufactured.
Democrats played the old political game right through the entire Biden administration. They wouldn't take risks, because of old line thinking. They wouldn't make bold moves, because Biden was a traditional politician who knew how government worked and was willing to keep things moving as slowly and painfully as possible because that was always the way they had done it. They squandered two years of political control of Congress and the White House, when they could have put a stop to Trump once and for all and had the asshole behind bars for good, because they dragged their feet, himmed and hawed, were afraid to look political and did not want to appear as if they had adopted the Republican methodology of winner take all and no compromise. They were determined to take the high road even though there was no one to compromise with. And the end result was that they helped put Trump back in the White House and gave the GOP control of Congress. And if Democrats don't make some drastic changes now, Biden will go down in history as the President who handed it all over to Trump and said, "Good luck."
If we'd taken some risks, like breaking the Senate filibuster to amend the judiciary act and pack the Supreme Court, we would not be staring at a blatantly unconstitutional immunity ruling, we would have had a Supreme Court that would have picked Trump's insurrection charges out of the moribund Justice Departments hands, cut the red tape and pushed it to its justified conclusion, branding him as the Insurrectionist he was, jailing him and ending any possibility of his re-election. There would, of course, have been some aftermath because of ending the filibuster, though that ancient and ineffective methodology should never be present in a Democratic Republic. And if we'd done that, then the 19 million or so Biden voters who dropped out and stayed home in 2024 would have had something to motivate getting their asses up off the couch.
We needed the kind of leadership being called for in this piece to sit down with Joe Biden, in the fall of 2022, and make sure that the transitional presidency to which he had alluded, and came up to the edge of promising, was the course of action. An open primary campaign may have very well produced a Kamala Harris candidacy, but making that go the primary and campaign route would have done two things we didn't do. One of those was to get two full years of exposure to an agenda in front of the voters, the other would have been to provide time and opportunity to listen to a lot of people who knew how to win elections. If we'd succeeded in keeping Trump off the ballot, this would have set the Democratic party up for control of the government for the foreseeable future. But we went the old line, old school, old political route of letting the incumbent, a long time Democratic traditionalist, make the decision himself. And now that long time Democratic traditionalist will be stained with the legacy of opening the door to the "existential threat to Democracy" that was the whole focus of his campaign and Presidency in the first place.
We had two years to pass legislation to shore up some of the areas of democracy where the trust required to make it work effectively no longer exists. And I'm going to say this because it needs to be said. We had four years, which isn't a long time, but long enough, to put the mechanisms in place that were necessary to prevent Republicans from stealing elections, instead of sitting idly by, claiming that someone was "on it," and letting the Republicans and Trump steal the 2024 election right out from underneath us in plain sight, with evidence already gathered and published. Read Greg Palast, if you want the gory details.
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