I think that’s a fairly subjective interpretation. Is a bill being written and endorsed by part of the party an indication of “real effort”?
I mean, if you’re a Congressional representative in a non-leadership position and you can’t get past the filibuster, I’d argue drafting a bill to address a problem is just about the best you can do. So yes, I’d argue that’s doing a very good job. I don’t hold it against the bill drafter that they have to deal with institutional inertia and a multi-party, bicameral federal bureaucracy.
I think the problem is that the DNC leadership’s only qualifier is seniority, so the “progressive” party is being helmed by ancient millionaires who were only really progressive by comparison during the regan era.
I don’t disagree, that’s a serious problem. It’s a bit more complicated than seniority alone, but seniority is still the anchor. But still, the rules are determined by majority vote in conference, and so unless I’m missing something that means a majority of the Democrats in the conference settle on the committee assignment rules each session. That certainly bakes in a significant amount of inertia because the folks already in a position of power retain that power through fluctuations in voter sentiment, but that also means that it would only take a simple majority to completely change those rules. The Senate Caucus leader chooses the Rules Committee which can recommend changes. The House Caucus rules can be modified only by the Speaker, but the Speaker is elected by the full Caucus, so for all intents and purposes a simple majority in either the Senate or the House could change the conference/caucus rules if they chose to. There isn’t currently a simple majority in either house that intends to change that rule structure, and so the problem doesn’t appear to be that the party is helmed by certain individuals, it’s that the party as a whole doesn’t intend to change the way they choose their leaders.
I can see your point, but this also ignores the fact that a lot of powerful Democrats are basically center right on the political compass and have been effectively captured by corporate interests, and have been for decades.
I can see why you think that, and at some times I think that as well, but rather than ascribe malevolent intentions to them I prefer to figure out how they got to Congress in the first place. In that regard, the true question is, do those powerful Democrats represent the center of gravity of the voting population that put them there? Or, more simply, is the average Democratic voter centrist or progressive? If the average Democratic voter is centrist, then we could argue that these leaders are simply representing the will of their constituents. If the average Democratic voter is progressive, then we could argue there’s some kind of institutional block to that will being reflected in the actions of the Party, which could be reflected in those rules or their inability to change them.
The most recent data I can find is from 2021, and it essentially says that even if we combine “outsider left” with “progressive left”, that bloc still only represents 28% of the voting bloc that is Dem/Lean Dem. “Democratic mainstays” and “establishment liberals” represent 51% of the Dem/Lean Dem bloc. Conservatives even make up 6% of that overall bloc, so in this context I’d group them together. If we grant that “stressed sideliners” might also fall into the more left-leaning category, we come to an explanatory break point of 57% that fall from center left to center right, and 42% that fall from left to far left. So in that respect the center of gravity of the party very much is on the moderate end, which would explain the leadership and rule dynamics described above. In short, there are more voters who agree with the moderate wing of the party than who disagree with it.
From the perspective of Lemmy, which leans overwhelmingly left, I can see how that might seem like an institutional or corrupting block of your ideals and intentions, but if we step back from the distorted view we have inside this particular platform, the fact remains that centrist Dems have power because the party itself is centrist. I get how that can feel deeply disappointing, and I get how that 42% might feel marginalized and sidelined, but at the end of the day it’s a majority-rules kind of situation, and so until that balance tips in favor of the left wing I don’t see that process meaningfully changing. Heck, it could even be argued that if those centrist Dems dramatically altered the rules in favor of a distributive model of power, and if that resulted in a disproportionate increase in the power of the left wing, their voters might be rightly pissed that the party is no longer representing their interests. I can’t imagine the next election going very well for them, because those centrists could very easily shift to the right, because they’re kinda right to begin with.
The problem, it seems, is with voters, not with the party. Which brings me to your final point:
You could argue that their commitment to third way politics has caused the current political situation where conservatives feel confident enough to be this intransigent in the first place. I personally feel that democratic leadership would rather have someone like Trump in the Whitehouse than someone like Bernie Sanders.
I agree completely. Third way neoliberalism is largely to blame for the state of our unequal and top-heavy economy, and it’s deeply imbedded because the conservative coalitions in both parties (in the 80s and 90s) found common ground in greasing the wheels for that economic transition to occur. The stress that system is putting our country under is starting to open up some very large cracks in American society as a whole.
But at the end of the day, the solution to that seems to be to elect more progressive candidates to office so the power balance tips in your favor. Joe Manchin would have no real power if there were about 2-3 more progressive Senators, at which point you could change the committee assignment rules to be more distributive. Same could be said about the centrist House members, but I’m sure the math is a bit steeper just because the House caucus is bigger. But since Senators are elected statewide, they kinda hew centrist by definition because they have to appeal to the whole electorate, so that might be a tall order. The House is where that sentiment would be more readily affected, but we’re captured by a conservative judiciary that’s decided gerrymandering is totally peachy. That’s not helped by the fact that leftists are clustering geographically, which dilutes their voting power even in situations where gerrymandering isn’t the main problem. They’re quite literally moving away from political races they might be able to win.