Balaam’s Cocktail Party Problem

By Eliot Gabriel Graham

The Democratic Party of the United States is the largest political party in the Western World, as well as the oldest active one. Like the United States, it’s massive and ungainly. The Democratic National Committee (DNC) is the central administrating organ charged with corralling this formidable enterprise. For starters, it’s important to distinguish between Democrats as such, and the DNC Democrats who organize and communicate the mission of their party. The purpose of the DNC is to coordinate state activism in presidential contests, administer campaigns, formulate strategies, articulate the party platforms, and the like. Advocating individual policies isn’t necessarily a component of the DNC’s remit: engineering the election of Democrats so as to affect DNC party platform planks, is. If Democrats don’t get elected, the DNC is the first to blame. They did a terrible job of handling the Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris campaigns, clearly. In both cases, the DNC seemingly couldn’t keep their candidates from losing. These election cycles witnessed too much effort being concentrated on pushing single-issue agendas. Lack of platform cohesion, committee over-activism, and institutional decay: Democrats have a cocktail party problem, and the DNC has yet to work out a solution.

Democrats and the Demes

One can make the case that the Democratic Party is the most successful of modern democracy. Continuously extant longer than any other is compelling enough. The first true American political party of colloquial national interest, Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party consisted of the grassroots interests of a geographically-expanding polity. In the early 19th century, the Federalist faction expired with British sympathies, opening up the field for a single-party era with James Monroe (1816-1824) as the president figurehead and torch bearer for the Democratic-Republicans. Known as the Era of Good Feeling, it was a period of American political maturation: the Constitutional framework being reconciled with governance mechanisms capable of maintaining the new country’s growth and development. Appropriately, the Democratic-Republican Party bifurcated as a matter of this era’s logical conclusion. The representative of the Republican faction, John Quincy Adams, achieved presidency in 1824 despite losing the plurality of both popular and electoral votes, owing to congressional machinations dubbed, the “Corrupt Bargain.” The faction of democrats, for their part, found emphasis in the democratic in pursuit of an incontrovertible public mandate. The capital “D” Democratic Party began, in effect, as a party organization designed to expand the electorate so as to get their candidate, Andrew Jackson, unequivocally elected in 1828, mobilizing, for the first time in the young country’s history a majority’s majority of eligible voters. The Democratic Party was borne of the need to orchestrate national campaigns, sourcing and branding platform policy from the local to the center and back.

The beginning of familiar contemporary American politics, for all intents and purposes, can be sourced to the Democratic-Republican Party. For it held together all the novel interests sprung from an ambitious, young democratic federal republic, with its seemingly insatiable appetite for territory. The nuance and complexity of these interests are contained in the body of ideas known as Jeffersonian Democracy. A tense binding of the rural and urban intellectual, as a political philosophy it promoted the agrarian over the urban; constitutional legalism over institutional formalism; and education as society’s harness. Paradoxical at first blush, tenets like these are the kind of preternatural contradictions that, like a dynamo, can produce useful light, or destructive heat. Jeffersonian Democracy modernized the country gentleman. Unlike a patrician, though, a Jeffersonian democratic-republican would be agrarian in position and legalistic, therefore educated in disposition, so as to be as constitutionally effective as possible. This carries a timeless universal appeal: even today, the urban intellectual idealizes the noble farmer. Understanding this dynamic is one of the keys to tracking the evolution of the Democratic Party.

Another heuristic is the relationship between that of demes and res publica. Demos, the modern incarnation of demes, is commonly represented incompletely. Often used as a stem word and interpreted as a classic term for “people”, this use belies the political context in which the term originated, which is instructive. People, in this sense, meant registers documenting residents of a particular Athenian district (similar in form to subdivisions one currently finds in unitary-style governments--arrondissements in France, wards in Japan, burroughs/unitary areas in England). The enfranchisement of the demes can be regarded as a considerable development of the electorate at the time, a liberal corollary to the hitherto dominant phratry, or family group. In effect this meant that the state now identified citizens by the district they lived in, rather than their family association (and entitlements thereof). (As a side note: decoupling the individual from the yoke of family is, it can be argued, one of the major advancements of western democracy.) Res publica, or “public affair”, is the Latin for politeia, the original title of Plato’s famous work on the subject. The Athenian boule (during the time of Cleisthenes, 6th century BC) was a republican body to which each deme sent a quotient of representatives for deliberation on matters of public import. Here, then, we have a framework to solve the primary problematic of liberal democracies: how to choose the people who make the decisions (deme), and how those decisions are made (res publica).

The principle-agent issue naturally follows this arrangement. When the American colonies decided to become a nation-state, their features of scale, development, and geographical expansion required a more complex administrative configuration between local and center, the notions of autonomy and sovereignty, respectively, needed modi for operandi and vivendi. Autonomous polities whose confederated center was required to defeat the British, their relationships to each other and to a capital commanded more detail in their structure upon victory. War is simple: peace is complex. Competing views of design dominated the First Party System (1792 - 1824), where the intellectual figures debated over degrees to which states should yield authority to the federal government, the Federalists versus Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans. Federated republics such as the United States need a mechanism to efficiently convey and coordinate the welter of public interest from local to federal, keeping pace with an expanding and shapeshifting polity. The demes of classical Athens, as far as one can tell, didn’t require competing political parties for their proper functioning (there were factions, to be sure). The same is true for the Monrovian Era. It stands to reason that political consensus obviates the need for political parties (see dominant single party performances of most East Asian democracies). A political party is itself a piece of administrative technology used as a conveyance apparatus for expressions of a citizenry --an ineluctably restless citizenry, in the case of the United States -- that need to find a way to the Federal. Like all administrative institutions, it’s susceptible to corrosion and decay.

Democrats and the Donkeys

The Democratic Party was spawn from a single political machine, the so-called Albany Regency. The party’s credited founder, Martin Van Buren, located inspiration for his Bucktails political faction from the storied Tammany Hall institution of New York City. Modeling the democratic organizing framework after these city machines, Van Buren was able to get Andrew Jackson elected in 1828 (and himself in 1836), officially launching the Democratic Party in the process. The Democratic National Committee was founded in 1848. A generation later the nation's Jeffersonian tension couldn’t be maintained, and the Union broke down under Democratic intransigence (Presidents Pierce and Buchanan). The Republicans controlled the Executive for the next two generations, leaving the Democrats to ossify at the downticket level. Municipal political machines thrived during this period as waves of fresh immigrants provided local chapters of the party with the electoral capital needed to sustain themselves. (Consider Boss Tweed.) And the partisan politics of big cities hasn’t changed much. New Orleans has had Democratic mayorship since 1872; Chicago: 1931 (Daley père et fils combining for nearly 44 years of that); Boston: 1930; Seattle and San Francisco since the 1960s. The assumption of the metropolitan mayor being a member of the Democratic Party has a long thread of historical truth.

At present, Americans hold Democrats responsible for the lugubriously slow post-Covid recovery of big cities. And rightly so. At their best, these deme machines are an efficient method of assimilation and coordination for a dynamic civic population. At worst, they’re a devolution into clientelism, mission creep, and breathtaking exhibitions of incompetence. It doesn’t take more than a year of living in Washington, D.C., to begrudgingly empathize with the notion of “Drain the Swamp”. Ever had a bad experience on the Washington Metro? In fact, the District of Columbia is a serviceable analogue for a slumping Democratic Party. Urban, inefficient, violent, unproductive, with a structural ghettoism whose perpetuation appears to be financing inexhaustible cocktail parties filled with smug moral diarists. “[T]he trouble with our liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant: it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.” Reagan was referring to Democrats at their worst. And since all democrats are local, when Democrats fail there, so goes the prospect of a successful White House run.

The Democratic Party manages the larger of the two tents of American interests, it’s fair to say. The platform it inherits and updates is bigger in both scale and scope. Structurally, it’s the architect of the American system of national politics. Mishandle the stewardship of this behemoth and you’ll look like Jackson’s Jackass. Get it right, though, and the country will appreciate you for its progress. The New Democrats got it right. Modernizing the way campaigns are run through more precise information gathering techniques and comprehensive platform messaging, referred to as triangulation, these Democrats were highly successful in the post-Reagan era of national politics. Up until 2016.

Democrats and the Technology

Politics is communication. As major shifts in technology shake up various media of communication, the political landscape will appear vertiginous almost immediately, and continue in this manner until the body politic can figure out how to absorb it. The Gutenberg Revolution, for extreme example, created a lasting imbroglio of over 200 years, the time it took for Europeans to modernize themselves into Westphalian nation-states. In America, presidents have, throughout the years, utilized novel forms of media to connect with the public. Lincoln made great use of the telegraph, specifically in the Union’s war effort. Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) used radio in his “Fireside Chats”. The televised persona of John F. Kennedy (JFK) made him a star. The White House website was launched during the Clinton administration, and the first presidential email sent. Barrack Obama was the first to leverage social media in his 2008 presidential run, complimenting Kennedy’s rock star momentum. But then smart phones and social media converged in ways that altered America’s ontological psychology, sparking a humanistic angst that feels epochal, unlike previous advancements. The presidential election of 2016 served as a worldwide coming of age of social technology, and the political volatility it’s capable of prompting.

The political Left has an awkward relationship with technology's lifecyle. In general terms, it takes a progressive environment to foster technological advancement. Silicon Valley is an offshoot of the 1960s counterculture hippy ethos. Kooky tinkerer spillovers from the Human Be-in found community in the Haight-Ashbury Switchboard, Project One, Community Memory, and even later on in the Homebrew Computer Club. However, the moment these fringe eccentrics come up with useful, marketable stuff, the business paradigm takes over, and political interests follow suit. Movements become businesses, which are, ipso facto, conservative. By the mid-2010s Silicon Valley’s latest iteration was a geyser of profit, minting fresh CS graduates with incomes incommensurate with their political maturity. As the management of big tech companies pursued their towering heights industry positions, their workforces began to feel uneasy about the unintended social malaise they were engineering. Employee guilt was expressed in donations to single-issue non-profits and special interests groups, fueling the extreme wings of the Democratic Party. By the 2016 primaries, finance and social media had so scrambled the frequency of the political landscape, the average American supported whichever candidate or issue they could most easily understand. In response, social media platforms cranked up their algorithms to further promote the sensation dimension of political issues that, in the end, favored the most histrionic. In responding to all this, the DNC appeared painfully flat-footed, and disunited at a time when strong coalition maintenance was needed.

Trump’s 2016 win left Democrats flummoxed. Instead of reflecting and correcting on the loss, however, they did like all Americans do when their politics fail: : fixate on the economy, and/or their single issues. They allowed Trump and technology to provoke them rabidly left on social issues. A social media content boom ensued. The birth of the YouTuber as a profession. Influencers, podcasters, reaction videos, social justice warriors, inter alia, all proliferated. As Silicon Valley was taken over by Big Tech, becoming monolithically profitable, the business morals of tech magnates began to supersede social morals. The entire field of reality was now available as a source of monetizable content. Add to this a libertarian faction of the information class seduced by technology into assuming that governance was no longer needed; somehow block chain was already replacing government writ large. More than half of the country pretended there wasn't a president. The pandemic of 2020 reminded the world of how valuable competent governance is, and how insidious social media had become. The Biden Administration was a responsible choice that, history will conclude, saved this country from pulling itself apart. Though his wasn’t a win for the Democrats, necessarily, but rather a win for the country.

Democrats and the Party

A structural adjustment should have been made during the 2016 Democratic Primaries. Your correspondent wrote the following:

Bernie Sanders: promote a third party. I don't care if it's the Independent Party, a newfangled Progressive Party, whatever. If there was a time for a healthy root to grow for a third party in this country, it's now (it was actually before the primaries when you still were a member of the Independents, but now'll do); you have the social and political capital to do so (but that's an ephemeral thing, bud). Stop shitting on the people you're piggybacking on: it's off-putting to reasonable progressives. Spin off.

Instead of doing the above he reveled in the “Bernie or Bust” glow, allowing the non-partisan Möbian fringe, the Locofocos, to corrode the 2016 elections. The Wiki leaks emails made clear DNC brass didn’t have the political acumen to deal with such a three-body problem. A coalition-building exercise their predecessors, the New Democrats, dealt with adroitly. And the country thereafter stepped on a rake, as a social-mediated, hyper-intellectually-impatient electorate proved incapable of strategic voting. (Faced with a comparable dilemma only a few months after, the French didn’t make the same mistake.) Your correspondent’s response to the 2016 election (with third-party voters and abstainers protesting with bacchanalian zest up and down Broadway on Capitol Hill, Seattle):

Last night was a victory for all the morons of my country--the Trump morons, the Bernie morons, the third party morons. Idiocy is the common thread of that constituency. But we won the popular vote; there are more of us out there, so we'll be okay.

There were more registered Democrats in 2016 than Republicans. This advantage continued into the Biden Administration. Instead of coalition-development required to maintain their superior numbers, the Democratic Party continued the splintering begun in 2016. Defund the Police was a jejune movement that went too far. Like most grievance movements, its legitimate animus has been overshadowed by a reckless overreaction spirited by shallow righteousness. Breakdown of public safety in America’s major cities, nearly all of which are run by Democrats, harks back to the corrupt Democratic city machines of the past. The new machines, though, have a tech component fueling them. As mentioned above the paradox of the liberal techie involves contributing inordinate amounts of guilt money to single-issue groups, maintaining the apparatus that digitally monetizes those issues, all the while pursuing a lifestyle at odds with those issues. This is the proverbial “bubble” everyone accuses everyone else of living in. Well-funded Democrats, too, and especially, lived in these bubbles of cocktail parties, busy entertaining each other as their party’s advantage slipped away.

The base of the Democratic Party covers the Jeffersonian expanse of interests discussed above, including its own conservatives, liberals and everything in between. Tensions between these factions is to be expected and embraced, even. The Jefferson coalition of the Bourbon and southern Democrat is a potent one. Some of the most effective executives of social change in the 20th century have been southern Democrats. Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ) understood it was better to have a big tent for everyone to piss out of than into. An attitude like this is needed for coalition building. Jimmy Carter’s empathetic posture enabled him to reach the White House, establish the Department of Energy and Department of Education, and champion human rights in arguably the most productive post-presidencies in modern American history. Another such Democrat who understood this dynamic was Bill Clinton of the so-called New Democrats. “There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured with what is right with America,” he announced at his first inauguration. These men hold the persons and programs of FDR and JFK as models of emulation. Idealism binds the rural to the urban intellectual, a singularly Democratic phenomenon. A more complete expression of such a fertile dichotomy couldn’t be found beyond Barrack Obama, a natural organizer with a knack for finding the common ground in everyone. Obama took the New Deal and Great Society efforts further, whilst serving as an embodiment of their success. The 111th Congress (his first year) is the most productive session since LBJ’s Great Society. It should be an emphasized point of pride with the Democratic Party, its institutional ability to identify and promote extraordinary people of modest origins--a Jeffersonian virtue.

But politics is a verb as well. And a political party shouldn’t be bad at politics. The DNC made a mess of the 2016 and 2024 presidential campaigns. Hillary and Harris should have been pretty easy sells. Both highly competent, experienced and skilled administrators. Instead Hillary was made to look callus and untrustworthy; Harris feckless and out of touch. Their opponent easily (and gallingly) made them out to be typically-corrupt champagne Democrats: Hillary of the dynastic sort; Harris of the old-school city machine genre. This is the DNC’s fault. Their handling of the Bernie, Wikileaks, and Comey issues in the case of Hillary, and the bungling of Biden’s recusal, Kamala’s messaging, and the fatal disaster of not realizing the influence of the Joe Rogan podcast on swing voters proved disastrous. The eye-watering fundraising reported by Forbes ($1.2 billion to the Harris Victory Fund, per an Oct. 4, 2024 FEC filing) suggest the Democrats don’t have a problem: their party does.

Era of Mediated Feelings

Will the tribulations of the DNC lead us to a Seventh Party system, with a new party capable of absorbing social media and new communication technology effectively? Or will the Democrats make the necessary adjustments and corrections to keep the party alive? As the party of demes at its core, and progress at its heart, mission creep is an existential hazard. The current period should be considered a bout of such, and treated transitionally, with a nose for opportunity. If the Democrats can figure out how to adjust to the new political landscape, disabusing the party of its elitist-network of inefficients, there may be a shot at reconstitution, and reinvigoration. The incompetent and the entitled are the twin angels of corruption, it must be remembered.

That politics has become so partisan over the last 25 years is due to political differences between citizens growing smaller and more acute (a sign of progress, in fact). The smaller the difference, of course, the more vain its presentation, especially in situations where technology mediates the interpersonal out of the social. And social media is not going away; it will continue to reward politicians who intuit its current presence and effects on popular sovereignty most accurately. The DNC needs to arrive at a comprehensive social media policy and fold it into a rebooted triangulation that communicates: the party’s significant policy successes of the last few generations, a comprehensive future mission focusing on the country as whole, and how this future inclusive Democratic Party will look. The political center has never been juicier with Reagan Democrats and Obama Republicans. One would do well to revisit William Jennings Bryan’s 1896 “Cross of Gold” speech -- “The man who is employed for wages is as much a businessman as his employer” -- making the necessary changes for a modern audience that address the demes, the donkeys, the technology and the party. A larger-than-life figure will be required to deliver it.

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