We don’t need more Democrats; we need better Democrats.
Or, ideally, a lot more representatives who aren’t Democrats at all.
(And who are also not Republicans, though in these fascist times that should go without saying.)
Jonathan Larson at The Fucking News had a good observation about this today:
The real issue in Congress isn’t age, it’s institutionalism.
Though this is more a problem with Congressional Democrats; the Congressional Republicans have been purging their institutionalists for quite a while now and don’t have many left.
More’s the pity.
Because institutionalism makes Republicans less likely to just fuck everything up all at once, but it makes Democrats less likely to stop them when they do try.
Institutionalist representatives slow the pace of change; radical ones accelerate it.
And what we have now is almost entirely radical Republicans combined with almost entirely institutionalist Democrats.
This is the very worst possible combination.
But there’s really no systemic way to fix that.
Even term limits leave the political machines intact and arguably leave candidates even more dependent on the party than they might be otherwise.
California’s relatively strict term limits, for example, haven’t done much about this; we’re still stuck with mostly party-machine candidates.
This is probably inevitable: electing candidates is what parties are for, so it’s natural that many or most candidates will be dependent on the party to be able to win.
So weakening the parties can’t be the solution.
And we do not want a system where only independently wealthy candidates can compete, after all.
No, if anything we should go in the opposite direction: we need a system where many, many more parties can effectively compete.
I described one such system here last summer in Ain’t Representin’:There’s Only One Solution To Gerrymandering, and showed how it would result in a much more accurate representation of the electorate’s views in Ain’t Representin’ II: What Congress Would Look Like Under Proportional Representation.
We may very well get a lot more Democrats this fall, but we’re not gonna get many better ones.
So we need a system that will let us have someone else.
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