Pravda (formerly lefty_news)

That's, I think, not a very accurate assessment. The establishment sets the ballets; they choose who gets party support and who doesn't. Challengers to encombents always fight an uphill battle and are never given the party resources they need to succeed. The Democratic Party is not a democratic institution; it does not operate at the behest of any kind of popular will. They use mechanisms like superdelegates and their complex formula for allocating delegates to ensure that the establishment is maintained.

Superdelegates explicitly increase the power of the institutional party members so they can combat rising "outsiders" in the party. Which is precisely how Sanders was snubbed in 2016. This started in the 1980s, roughly 40 years ago. Strange how this aligns with your perspective on when this started happening. This change in rules explicitly dampens the impact of grassroots movements inside the party. Which is precisely what I was trying to communicate. Since the 80s, the influence of superdelegates had grown, and only recently, as of 2018, had their influence been reduced (but not by much). The impact of this is that institutionalists in the party were able to shape the party around institutionalist ideas, meaning to isolate themselves against new or popular ideas.

It is incredibly rare to have anyone in the party that deviates from the consensus inside the party, because the way the party is structured reinforces its norms and beliefs. This is why people like David Hogg have been removed from positions of power in the party. Hogg explicitly stated he wants to oust ineffective party members, and the party recoiled in horror. So it is clearly not the fault of the voter base, but the fault of the Democratic Party not offering candidates worth voting for. They are not interested in effective leadership because they have insulated themselves from popular ideas and sentiments since the 1980s. If anything, that period in time laid the foundation for the Democrats reaching across the aisle to continue to dismantle FDR reforms throughout the 90s. This is what was called "Third Way" politics, which was just spit shine on top of Reagan and Thatcher Neo-liberalism. This entire idea of working from "the center" has lived on through the 90s into today, which has given us the likes of Obama, H. Clinton, Biden, and Harris. All of whom were ready to work from the center to "get things done". The problem with that is that the center isn't static. As the right moves more right, the center travels with it. Which is why we've seen the party turn its back on its previous views on the border and on immigration. Why it insists on adopting right-wing positions broadly. They see success on the right, and attribute it to their ideas, but the reality is, it's the lack of real-world problem solving from the Democrats that led to their defeat. They can't see these real-world solutions because they have isolated themselves from new ways of thinking.