In an ideal world, a badly run Democratic Party would be spurred to improve after it lost elections, which would result in the defenestration of bad party bosses and the ouster of bad candidates:

pluralistic.net/2023/04/30/wea…

But the US political system is not an ideal world. In the real world, it's possible for party bosses who pursue disastrous strategies that result in key electoral losses to remain in power.

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The Democratic Party still rakes in massive donations from people who hate Trump more than they hate the Democratic Party's incompetence. Candidates in gerrymandered safe seats can be wildly incompetent and still hold onto power for improbably long timescales, despite the manifest evidence of their total unfitness for office:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Lipi…

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American politician

^{Contributors to Wikimedia projects (Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.)}

In the absence of real consequences for corruption, incompetence and utter moral turpitude, the Democratic National Committee needs some other form of discipline to get it into fighting form. We need to occupy the DNC, strengthen its institutional safeguards, and turn it into an election-winning, fascism-fighting, extinction-rebelling, worker-defending powerhouse.

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Three weeks from now, the DNC will meet in National Harbor MD to elect its new president and officers. Who gets to vote on that? The 448 members of the party's national committee. Who are they? As Micah Sifry writes for *The American Prospect*, it's a secret, even to the committee members:

prospect.org/politics/2025-01-…

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Opening the DNC’s Black Box

Why we’re publishing a previously undisclosed list of all 448 members of the Democratic National Committee

^{Micah L. Sifry (The American Prospect)}

No, really. While nominally, members can request a list of their fellow members, the DNC stalls and stonewalls and does everything it can to prevent the committee from communicating in any way they can't control. This is incredible, but it's true. Which is why Sifry has published a leaked list of all 448 members:

docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d…

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DNC member list

^{Google Docs}

Looking at the spreadsheet of members, we get a rare glimpse inside the Democratic sausage factory. There's te 73 "at large" members who were voted on as a single block after being handpicked by outgoing president Jaime Harrison. These members are a mix of great people and terrible people, and that's by design: it meant that Sanders and Warren voters could only get their people onto the committee if they voted for some of the most disgusting corporate shills you can imagine.

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The fact that the national committee's membership is secret and their communications must pass through a DNC chokepoint means that they get up to all *kinds* of shenanigans, like at the 2023 summer meeting where they voted themselves the power to throw out any bylaw amendments passed at a national party convention.

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The vote was whipped by paid DNC staff, creating an atmosphere so poisonous that Jessica Chambers (a rep from Wyoming) called the DNC "the least democratic organization that I’m involved with."

Sifry's breakdown is really useful: he identifies the minority of members who are elected by the party rank-and-file, calling them "the people most responsive to what the base of the party cares about."

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He also calls out the corporate shills who "buckrake as lobbists," like Donna Brazile, "a partner at “corporate reputation strategy firm.”

But even where state party organizations have elections for their committee members, some states keep the results of those elections a secret. Illinois, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania have 69 members, but the identities of all but 14 of them are a secret.

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This is a rotten institution, and that's by design. If you want to know why we can't have nice things - or, you know, a world that's not on fire and haunted by creeping fascism - this is why. The takeover of the DNC won't be easy, but it can't start until we know who the DNC *is*.

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