We need a new Democratic Party

[Jim Lane]

86. Fixing by tweaks is a long, difficult process, but it's all we have.

One obvious non-tweak, which some in this thread have taken you to mean, is to start a new party (or to work with the Greens or one of the other minor parties now out there). IMO, that's completely hopeless. The Nader debacle of 2000 showed that, in the short term, minor-party politics accomplishes nothing except to pull votes away from the less objectionable of the major parties. It would take decades before the Greens or any other such effort became significant, at which point the surviving Democratic Party would be pulling votes away from them. It would take yet more decades before the new party became fully competitive with the Republicans. Until then, there would be many, many elections in which a Republican won with a mere plurality of the votes.

That leaves us with the Democratic Party. How do we get it to be a genuinely progressive party? The only path is through a succession of victories in primaries and in the races for party positions. We don't need to win every such race. The target is that, over the long run, we win more than we lose, and thus the party infrastructure and the Democratic officeholders move toward the left.

There's just no other way to get there from here. You aren't going to publish a ringing manifesto on DU that gets millions of Democrats around the country to join in rebuilding the party from the ground up.