The Illusion of Party Unity in the Democratic Party

Gallegos, who chairs the board of RootsAction, is on the steering committee of the nationwide State Democratic Party Progressives Network, an independent group that formed last year. “Democratic parties at the state level also have policies or traditions to appoint local committee members or national committee representatives, consequentially pushing out their more progressive or reformist members from positions of power,” she said. In short, “the Democratic Party leadership appears to be more concerned with maintaining their control of the party than with promoting democracy within the party.”

When it comes to their decision-making, some state parties have headed in more democratic directions—or the opposite. I’ve seen firsthand that the nation’s largest one, the California Democratic Party, has steadily become more autocratic for over a decade.

Overall, big donors and entrenched power are propelling the Democratic Party.

After Judith Whitmer became an active DNC member as chair of the Nevada Democratic Party, she got a close look at the committee’s inner workings. “Today’s Democratic Party is run by consultants and operatives who tightly control every aspect of the DNC,” she texted me. “The big-tent party that champions ‘democracy’ is actually a small circle of insiders who hold all the power by maintaining the status quo. Dissenting opinions are not welcome. Progressives are ostracized, and the everyday voter no longer has a voice.”

In early 2021, a progressive insurgent campaign enabled Whitmer to be elected chair of Nevada’s Democratic Party. Powerful Democrats in the state, outmaneuvered by that grassroots organizing, quickly transferred $450,000 from the Nevada party’s coffers to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and set up a parallel state organization. Two years later, the erstwhile party establishment retaliated by crushing Whitmer’s reelection bid.

In a Word: Undemocratic

Subduing progressive power is a key goal of dominant party leaders as they gauge when and where to strike. While nominally supporting the two-term progressive congressman Jamaal Bowman for reelection in his New York district last month, powerful party elders nonetheless winked and nodded as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee poured some $15 million into backing a corporate pro-war Democrat against him.

“The Democratic Party is, in one word, simply undemocratic,” Joseph Geevarghese, executive director of the national activist group Our Revolution, told me. “The illusion of ‘party unity’ fostered by Biden and Bernie [Sanders] four years ago is gone. In fact, the donor class feels emboldened to wage war openly with progressives, especially after defeating Jamaal Bowman.”

I saw the illusion of party unity playing out at sessions of the Unity Reform Commission that the DNC convened in 2017. The calculus was that the strength of Bernie Sanders forces, then at high ebb, had to be reckoned with. The commission had a slight but decisive majority of members aligned with Hillary Clinton, while the rest of the seats went to allies of Sanders. While the commission did adopt some modest reforms, the majority balked at substantive DNC rules changes that would have provided financial transparency or prevented serious conflicts of interest.

Overseeing the blockage of those changes was Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, the commission chair, who later worked for three years as deputy chief of staff in Joe Biden’s White House. She went on to become the Biden campaign chair.

“The Democratic Party now functions through foundation-funded advocacy organizations, and without the kind of self-funded mass membership groups that had a genuine voice with real power when the labor and civil rights movements were strong,” journalist David Dayen wrote in early July for The American Prospect. “If you read the polls, the interests of the public and the donor class are actually aligned in favor of Biden’s withdrawal. But given who’s making that case, it sure doesn’t feel that way, nor does it feel particularly small-d democratic. That makes it easy for Biden to fall back on the will of ‘the people’ who voted in Democratic Potemkin primaries, because outside of that, the people are voiceless.”

Money in Charge

Alan Minsky, executive director of Progressive Democrats of America, had this to say when I asked him to describe the party’s political culture: “While the Democratic Party is a complex organization with a lot of dimensions, I think the role of money—and, more specifically, the never-ending need to raise more money—has become its central organizing principle. This, of course, skews the priorities of the party in a conservative direction. Democrats who can raise money comparable to the levels raised by the GOP are seen as indispensable to the party, and grow in power and influence.… In turn, these powerful money-raising Democrats have little use for anyone inside the party who is perceived as jeopardizing the flow of money—such as left-progressives and other advocates for the poor and working class.”

Minsky added: “As these dynamics became central to the party over the past few decades, the rich and powerful grew in influence, and the general political culture reflected the priorities of the professional class rather than the working class, a sharp contrast to the mid-20th century, which was the height of the party’s power and influence.

“However, since the GOP only turns ever more to the right, progressives and working-class advocates continue to stake a claim in the Democratic Party. Paradoxically, since these non-wealthy groups represent the majority of the population, they also provide the best opportunity for the party to regain its majority status. However, from the point of view of the party’s dominant faction, and their legions of highly compensated consultants, this is an unacceptable outcome as it would shut down the gravy train.”

The Democratic National Committee building on South Capitol Street in Washington is a monument to the funding prowess of multibillionaire Haim Saban, who became the chair of the capital campaign in late 2001 to raise $32 million for the new headquarters. He quickly donated $7 million to the DNC, believed to be the largest political donation ever made until then.

Haim Saban has long been close to Bill and Hillary Clinton. By 2016, Mother Jones reported, Saban and his wife, Cheryl—in addition to hosting “lucrative fundraisers”—had given “upward of $27 million to assorted Clinton causes and campaigns.”

Saban and Joe Biden also bonded. When Saban had an appointment at the White House last September, “the visit was supposed to last an hour, as part of lunch, but in practice he spent three hours with the president and his people,” the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronoth reported.

Reasons to reaffirm warm relations with the likes of Haim Saban were obvious. Presumably, the president remembered that a single virtual fundraiser the Sabans put together for the Biden-Harris campaign in September 2020 brought in $4.5 million. In February 2024, with the Gaza slaughter in its 135th day, the Sabans hosted a reelection fundraiser for the president at their home in Los Angeles. The price of a ticket ranged from $3,300 to $250,000. An ardent Zionist, Saban has repeatedly said: “I’m a one-issue guy, and my issue is Israel.”

This summer, while Biden fought to retain his spot as nominee, fervent support from the Congressional Black Caucus seemed pivotal. The CBC has changed markedly since the 1970s and 1980s, when its leadership came from visionary representatives like Shirley Chisholm, John Conyers, and Ron Dellums. Then, the caucus was anti-war and wary of corporate power. Now, it’s overwhelmingly pro-war and in willing captivity to corporate America.

With President Biden in distinct denial about his unfitness to run again, the role of the Congressional Progressive Caucus was accommodating. Its chair, Pramila Jayapal, endorsed him for 2024 gratuitously early—in November 2022—declaring herself “a convert.” Since then, some high-profile progressives went out of their way to back Biden in his determination to run for reelection.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who endorsed Biden a year ago, went in front of journalists 10 days after his debate disaster to make a vehement pitch for him as the nominee. In a similar mode, Senator Bernie Sanders was notably outspoken for Biden to stay on as the party’s standard-bearer, even implausibly claiming on national television that, with a proper message, “he’s going to win, and win big.”

When some of the best progressive members of Congress fall under the spell of such contorted loyalty, it’s an indication that deference to the leadership of the Democratic Party has come at much too high a price.