Gatekeepers v. Barbarians
A second attempt at last week's post about "being a Democrat"
I didn’t love the prose last week, and I’ve been chewing over what it is, really, that I’d like to say.
And then, over the weekend, a few news items from my favorite city’s mayoral race reminded me.
First, you should know that I am definitely in the anybody-but-Cuomo camp. I’ve been in the anybody-but-Cuomo camp for a really long time.
This piece by
outlines basically all of my objections to Cuomo as someone who has lived in New York state for 23 years, and who lived in New York City for 18 of those years.
So that’s where my politics are. I don’t care for corruption, and I especially don’t care for contemptuous politicians.
But I seem to be outside the mainstream of “my party” on this matter.
Congressman Clyburn, who picked Joe Biden in 2020, and then stood by him after his disastrous debate performance in 2024, decided that last week would be a great time to jump in and give Cuomo a boost.
Once-Republican, twice-elected NYC former mayor and billionaire Mike Bloomberg has poured over $8 million into Cuomo’s campaign. One assumes that, as an avowed Suburban-to-subway rider, he doesn’t care for buses, free or otherwise. Or maybe it’s the promise to raise taxes on the 1%. Who can say why he dislikes Mamdani to the tune of $8 mil.
And then former Bill Clinton felt it would help if he threw his name in as an endorsement for Cuomo.
It’s likely that all of this is in response to three things:
Mamdani’s polling numbers have risen 10 pts on the initial ballot test since last month; Cuomo’s numbers are flat. According to the most recent poll, he beats Cuomo if it goes to the final ballot.
Candidates are cross-endorsing each other1, chiefly in an effort to lock out Cuomo, and “don’t rank Cuomo” has become a standard phrase uttered by any vaguely liberal blog, podcast, or Zoom call I’ve partaken in lately.2
Brad Lander got himself arrested by ICE and showed what a mayor who’ll fight Trump might actually look like in practice.
You can see why “the establishment” is getting restless.
Bismarck for Mayor?
The Democratic Party establishment does not like Lander and Mamdani, with their small-s socialist tendencies including: rent freezes for already rent-stabilized apartments, free buses, city-operated grocery stores for people on food assistance so that assistance goes farther than in privately run grocery stores, creating a Department of Community Safety to take the burden off police to act as social workers, closing Rikers, picking up the trash, getting NYPD to focus on gun crime, standing up for immigrants, building more housing, expanding free pre-K and child care, etc etc.
I’m not going to bother litigating the feasibility or costs of these proposals, but I find the general line of “don’t vote for candidates who say they’re going to do broadly popular things their state legislature will surely block” to be a very, very strange way to run a rodeo.
But it does harken to what some say originated with Otto von Bismarck: the art of the possible. The Democratic Party, the Actual Democrats — because remember, you and I are not officially Democrats, so we have no official role in shaping the party and no way of holding it to account save voting in primaries — sees themselves as Gatekeepers, while social democrats, like Lander, Mamdani, AOC, and others, are the Barbarians at the Gate.
But lately it seems that rebuffing the incursions of slightly-further-left candidates into the Democratic Party has become the real work of the Party itself. Defend its Gatekeepers and Benefactors — rebuff the Barbarians — wait for the regime to become unpopular and then … What?
More of the Same versus Change
Last week we learned that two union leaders had departed from their committee roles at the DNC. I think it bears quoting each of them to understand why they might have done this:
“While I am proud to be a Democrat, I appear to be out of step with the leadership you are forging, and I do not want to be the one who keeps questioning why we are not enlarging our tent and actively trying to engage more and more of our communities,” Weingarten said in a June 5 letter obtained by CNN.
and
“These are new times. They demand new strategies, new thinking, and a renewed way of fighting for the values we hold dear. We must evolve to meet the urgency of this moment,” Saunders said. “This is not a time to close ranks or turn inward.”
This of course came after David Hogg decided not to seek reelection to his role with the DNC (many had complained about Hogg using his separate PAC to support primary challengers in some Democratic races around the country). Hogg’s criticism of the DNC sounds a lot like Weingarten and Saunders’:
“What people are trying to do is focus on talking about me a lot of the time, when really it’s because they don’t want to talk about the fact that we do have a real problem — a real problem with comfortability and competition,” he said, “and they don’t want to acknowledge the uncomfortable truth, which is that we have to dramatically change as a party and what brought us here, is not what’s going to get us out.”
Meanwhile, Ken Martin is the chair of the DNC. He was apparently elected because of his deep relationships with Democratic governors around the country. But maybe also because of this now infamous comment:
Cool.
Meanwhile, here’s a headline for you:
“The DNC’s cash crunch deepens as new filings show Republicans with a huge advantage” - via CNN
Where are those good billionaires? What are they waiting for?
You are not a Democrat, redux
Here’s what I was trying to say:
We do not have European style parties that allow you to vote how you like and/or officially join the party, and have a say in issues and candidates and leadership. Therefore, you are not an Actual Democrat. You are at best a fan of the Democrat team, and more likely, simply a frequent buyer of Democrat products (i.e., candidates).
Actual Democrats have been left with a system that is weaker than it was before the spread of the primary system in the 1970s. As a result Actual Democrats feel defensive against further incursions on the power they have left. The wagon-circling we see now in NYC is reflective of that dynamic.
The source of power Actual Democrats have is the money class — the millionaire and billionaire and celebrity donors. Despite their love of promoting their adoption of small dollar donations, they simply do not feel the same duty to someone giving $50 a month that they feel to someone who will write million-dollar checks. This sometimes creates a tension between the gatekeeping of the Actual Democrats’ establishment and the insatiable need for cash ($2 billion last cycle!) that good billionaires provide… in exchange, of course, for their own interests being protected and their own interests being expressed.
Nevertheless, Actual Democrats need voters to achieve their and their donors’ goals. They have generally been able to rely on their voters to behave. But as we have seen, 6 million of their voters are not reliable enough — and their choice to either switch or stay home can make or break an Actual Democrat’s campaign.
Likewise, voters, some of whom comprise the small dollar donors to campaigns, made up 40% of the Harris campaign’s fundraising in 2024, according to OpenSecrets.
So in this universe of Actual Democrats, along with their mouthpieces, their bankers, and their voters, the difficulty is balancing the interests of each of these constituencies.
Right now, the Actual Democrats are, I think it’s fair to say, doing a terrible job of doing that balancing.
And they are paying for it with weak approval ratings, a desire for a change of leadership, and flirtations with social democrats from their own most likely supporters. Meanwhile, they seem to want to continue to poll test their way to a set of ideas and ideals, preferring opinion chasing to opinion leadership.
Is there an answer to this problem?
Someone asked in last week’s comments how American political parties could become more like European ones.
As far as I can tell, they just… could. I’m not an election law expert so I will try to dig into this more, but the DNC could decide to let people “subscribe” to the party. But they would have to offer real benefits of the subscription. The parties and activist groups often spur voters to write to or call their representatives, but we are never really spurred to write to all of our representatives.
The Actual Democrats represent Democratic voters — and not just the rich ones — when they decide what the Party platform will be, who they will invest in as candidates, who they will loudly support and endorse, and how they speak to the public when they do.
There are somewhere in the neighborhood of 75 to 81 million voters who can be enticed to vote for a Democrat. They should have more power here than the (I’m guessing) several thousand Actual Democrats in the country. But that would require a style of participation much higher on the ladder than most Actual Democrats, quite clearly, are comfortable with.
The Original Ladder
The ladder theory3 is typically credited to Sherry Arnstein. In her 1969 paper in the Journal of the American Planning Association, Arnstein put forth a model that was meant to be provocative. At the surface, the paper outlined a simplified schematic of varying modes of citizen participation, particularly in communities that could benefit from HUD Model City programs in the mid and late 1960s.
The simplest way to ‘read’ the ladder is to imagine that, as a citizen ascends from the bottom of the ladder to the top, institutions relinquish more control to citizens — in other words, at the bottom of the ladder, institutions have all the control and are merely manipulating citizens to go along with programs and policies, and at the top of the ladder, citizens have control over the programs and policies, and institutions are there at most to execute those programs and policies.
But, a deeper reading of this ladder reveals something else — a description of a bidirectional system of control.
The model exposes systems and structures of control by institutions over citizens. What will institutions allow citizens to do? How much or how little do institutions intend to listen and respect the citizens who do participate? How accountable are institutions to the citizens who speak up and participate? What is the history of institutions in relationship with citizens in a community or over a particular area of policy?
The model simultaneously acknowledges the systems of control by citizens over institutions. What knowledge do they possess? How do they communicate? Who do they represent? How organized are they? How accountable to other citizens are they?
Arnstein was describing a system of control — a system with a history and a location, with tensions between institutions and the citizens in the community, and a struggle over who has control over whom.
The Democratic Party is, for most people who vote for Actual Democrats, an ephemeral thing. It appears every four years to host a series of primaries and the convention. It does not have a grounded place in our communities. You probably have no idea who represented you at the DNC last year (this is who represented me, and she is a private citizen, no longer elected to any public office).
How might our politics be different if the system of control the Democratic Party lives within was more widespread, more local, and more bidirectional? What if voters weren’t simply tokens, but actual power centers? What would it look like for you to be able to watch a local Democrat meeting streaming on YouTube, or go to the local library or VFW to attend one, or get to — as a benefit of membership — get to vote on the party platform from the website?
It might look — and I know this sounds crazy — like a democratic party.
I hope that’s clearer. It’s certainly longer.
Well, some are, and some aren’t.
Don’t rank Cuomo. Thank you.
I have written about this previously at far greater length for a now-defunct project called First Person Project I co-founded with
and will try to resurrect those posts and put them here.