Ailments > Healings

Earlier I read a phrase that the meager attempt of a solution providing resolution to a tremendous problem was akin to:

aspirin for cancer

And I jumped to the metaphor that the machinations of Democrats and the Democratic Party are antibiotics — over-prescribed and increasingly ineffective.

There are various fronts and flanks and subcommittees among the Democrats: senators and congresspeople within the federal system, legislators across the states, and those at the municipal and local levels; the Blue Dogs; the New Democrats; the Progressive Caucus; the social liberals who purport to be fiscal conservatives; the alumni of the Obama administration, the alumni of the Clinton administration, and those who worked in both; co-sponsors of the Green New Deal; the military hawks versus the peaceniks; and the Squad. Obviously, there are others but this is an incomplete list.

And there’s some sparring, jockeying, subterfuge, allying and aligning between different individuals and certain camps. I speculate that there’s not cohesion or unanimity on the benefits and reasons for growing the numbers of D elected officials as some of the DS in Congress do not care for other DS, and some of them are capable of befriending and cuddling and aligning with Republicans. The split between the Bernie Sanders supporters versus the Hillary Clinton supporters became a leadership vote (and upset) within the Nevada Democratic Party that is now causing the power and roles between the national body (the DNC) and the state parties to be renegotiated. Even though many leaders of the state parties may not have stood with the current NV leadership on the Bernie/Hillary vote, they are seemingly with the outsiders and insurgents-who-have-become-officials interns of data files, money and bank accounts and some other forms of power-sharing or power-grabbing.

That being said, the suggestions that what will salvage or strengthen the levers of power and structures of politics are more Democrats are offering a miserable remedy for a severely broken apparatus.

The continued dependence on a two-party system inhibits us from destroying some of the legal and financial structures that are barriers that essentially prohibit new actors from entering politics. When the legal barriers are too high that they are nearly impossible to alter, we are told to settle into the limited notion that we most work within the Democratic or Republican Party, which is inadequate for the ailments that we face. There are special interests who maintain the status quo and they do not wish to move towards greater democracy.

They will not accede without demands. so we must make many demands.