With all the discussion around reform, the political revolution and how to proceed I think it behooves us to understand what we may be getting into. One agenda for moving forward includes taking over or at least expanding our footprint within the Democratic Party. It's a sound idea: start at the local level and take over the party organization, get candidates who are progressives elected as democrats, and bob's your uncle. The problem is that this plan demonstrates a misunderstanding of the structure of the party and how the people who wield power within it do so.

The party is in fact two different things: the "official" party (i.e. the legal entities and committees that run them) and the "actual" party (primarily elected politicians, ex-elected politicians, and their social circle, henceforth dubbed "elites"). Any transformation of the party has to include a simultaneous and independent effort at transformation on both fronts. This is because the two feed off each other.

Simply running over a local committee during the organizational meeting isn't sustainable, because the "elites" will just make sure to correct that at the next one if they don't simply ignore it completely. Replacing some of the "elites" in office doesn't replace their sycophantic and incompetent lackeys at the local and state level committees (who, ultimately, feed the national level committee). It also doesn't replace the elites who remain and who will back the other guy anyway (see: Lieberman vs. Lamont).

Seems to me one may as well start a third party. The effort required to field candidates is a different challenge (finding them, as opposed to fighting an entrenched set of elites) that is, in my view, less onerous than fighting the entrenched establishment. Organizing a party is as simple as simply declaring it. Official recognition and ballot access requires extra work, but simply forming the organizational structure of a party is trivial. With social media, outreach is much less cumbersome than in years past. An alternative is to attempt to join (really, take over) a small third party, such as the Green Party. There will be some friction from the existing established leadership there, but the overall alignment of goals is much better.

In either case, the fight with the establishment (Democratic and Republican alike) will still exist, but only in the general election.

On the other hand, one argument for working within the Democratic party that seems to be very potent is related to the "brand" effect and our first-past-the-post system. The thinking is that it's easier to try to overcome entrenched democrats via primaries and thus not have to compete against the "spoiler" meme than it is to gain ballot access and convince sufficient numbers of disaffected democrats to vote for your candidate in the general election. "Besides," one might say, "the Tea Party started with nothing and they run the GOP now!".

It's true that the Teabaggers run the GOP now, within a very limited and very complicated context. What isn't true is the implied notion that the "transform from within" approach we've seen examples set for is similar to what the Teahadists did. In fact, the Teanutters were able to achieve what they did because they were willing to lose by withholding support if their nominees lost and also because they were well funded by Koch money from the beginning. Neither of these things is evident in any of the current discussion around, e.g. Brand New Congress. The financial backing is obviously missing and would be rejected besides, since Bernie's campaign has demonstrated it's unnecessary in order to advance quite far.

Willingness to lose an election (to a Republican) is not something in evidence that the left advocating for this "transform from within" approach is willing to do. Instead we see Berner after Berner hopping on the Hilltrain. What evidence is there this will change for BNC's 2018 effort? If (when?) that changes I may revise my opinion.

Until then, I ask again: why bother trying to transform the party from within? If it (almost) always results in the progressive candidate who loses a primary throwing support behind the establishment "D" victor because the "R" is worse, what's the point? It serves no purpose but allowing supporters an opportunity to pat themselves on the back for trying. If there is any sincerity behind this movement, it has to be willing to do more than run a primary candidate every once in a while and say "welp, we tried" if it doesn't succeed. I don't see any evidence of that even beginning to happen.