Just wrote an essay saying pretty much the same (won't be out until early December)....
It's really not worth an individual's time to engage with national politics beyond the ballot box. Those people are up to shenanigans that are beyond our control.
It is locally where we have a chance at having a voice. First in our homes, through thoughtful conversation with family. Then in our communities, with thoughtful conversations with friends and neighbors, local shopkeepers and service providers, even local civil servants. That's where most of us would be most effective.
Some may have a wider, larger platform, but even those who have contact with the city hall or the county seat or the state house, if they live in your community, you can have local access and express and work on local evolution and improvement.
Always say the same thing, 20-mile radius of your hearth. That's where you're going to be the most effective and the most satisfied with your contribution.
So much truth here, Tom. Thank you for the dose of reality. We've been waiting relentlessly it seems.
In the end, if we think globally and act locally, we can indeed be the change, perhaps create a new foundation for the future of our kids.
In this moment, the tragedy of settling for a promise of a vote that we know will never come, the heartbreak of knowing how many people will suffer without continued subsidies. It's horrific. And surely, it's the last straw in terms of supporting our party. Of believing in promises. Of endlessly contributing to more of the same.
It's time to create. To strategize within our communities. To bring power back to the people where it belongs. The power is there if we learn to channel it wisely.
I'll add only that when I canvassed for HRC in 2016, I learned two things. People don't want to answer the door, and don't want to receive multiple calls from the same person. Disorganization, as much as anything cost Dem's that election. The sick feeling I had that night is still in my stomach. There's a saying about continuing to do the same thing, yet expecting a different result.
Really truthful, and moving, piece. So much so that I will spare you my tirade on Obamacare. I agree that the Democratic Party needs a dramatic change in leadership and to run on a platform to rebuild the middle class and to root out corporate and political corruption. Thanks, TJ!
Thank you. And I hear you. What you’re saying is exactly what so many people are feeling but rarely say out loud: the party can’t just manage decline anymore. It needs a real course correction, real leadership, and a real commitment to working people instead of donors and consultants.
If we’re going to rebuild the middle class and clean out the rot, it starts with telling the truth the way you just did and demanding a party that’s worthy of the people it claims to represent.
We must still win local House seats to stop the madness. I had NO hope we would have fair elections next year, but people shamed me by showing they want us to fight on 11/4/25.
People should be recruiting the most substantive, charismatic, youngish and activated candidates in every House District to primary the too frightened, clueless and purchased incumbent Dems. This is still local organizing. We must fight and take back the House and the party for the people.
Yes. The fight isn’t over,it’s just coming home. What happens in each district, each community, each precinct, will decide not only the House but the soul of the party. Local organizing isn’t just strategy,it’s survival. The people have spoken: no more waiting for permission to lead.
This piece is a clarion call. I’ve long known the Democratic Party can’t steer this ship toward anything that thrives—it simply can’t. Even with good intentions, every move within U.S. politics is circumscribed by the global logic of extraction. It’s a system nested in scarcity, performance, and profit.
What you’re describing at the end of your piece—local organizing, mutual aid, refusal to comply with systemic cruelty—isn’t just pragmatic. It’s the real work. It’s transforming the failed promises of modernity into something else. Something relational. Something that stitches us back into the fabric of the wider, living world that we've long separated ourselves from.
I’m starting to almost welcome this collapse. Not the hurt and pain it involves - of course, not that.... but it is an invitation to root where we are. To build what can’t be bought. To prepare the ground for what might come after this long, strange fever breaks.
great post, Tom. Remember how the Harlem Globetrotters brought a team with them, the Washington Generals (also known as the New York Nationals, the Boston Shamrocks, the Atlantic City Seagulls, etc.) so it looks like there is a game being played, when it's really as much an exhibition as a WWF event? One time they accidentally one, in 1971, under the name the New Jersey Reds. The Globetrotters were running out the clock when one of the Reds stole the ball and scored. It was all in the script, and the fans hated it.
The Democratic party is that team. They have the same sponsors, the same goals. Their biggest hero, Barack Obama, gifted their largest donors and never challenged the status quo. Biden was so busy trying to repair the damage Trump caused in his first term nobody bothered to see that he, too, was gifting the billionaires. They are track to transfer more than ten trillion dollars to the 400 controlling families by the end of the decade. They do not give a fuck if everybody but them dies by starvation, disease, or (preferably) acts of violence as they fight for the scraps.
We came close in 2015 to mobilizing around a leader who took zero corporate dollars and almost managed to force the party machine to back him. They ratfucked him as bad as Truman's boys did Henry Wallace in 1944. They learned their lesson and in 2020 he wasn't allowed to get close because they ran spoilers, some of whom are now posing as "heroes of the people."
The major victories for regular people came from presidents who betrayed the machine that put them there: TR with the robber barons and warmongers who supported McKinley, FDR with the New York gentry that made him governor, JFK with the mob and the unions, and LBJ with the southern machine. Everyone else has been a company man. The system is functioning as designed. Jefferson and Madison had great rhetoric, but the goal was always to protect wealth and power above all else.
They call this democracy. I call it nominal democracy at best. It's oligarchy salted with bureaucracy, capitalist propaganda, racism, genocidal war-worship (thank you for your service you sucker of a minimum wage mercenary, and have fun grunting in a third world country sitting on a pile of oil, opium, rare earth minerals, or some other resource... we call it "fighting for our freedoms) and let's not forget Joel Osteen's version of prosperity Christianity. It was rotten from the start. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal" was penned by a slave-owing rapist drunk on his own intellect who didn't believe men were created at all, let alone equal. All lies, but man they sure have a RING to them.
Bulls-eye, Tom. Us out here trying to serve the basic needs of (gestures and pirouettes) just about everyone in what used to be called the middle class, have watched this unfold for years, accelerating especially since the turn of the century.
We have financialized every damn thing that used to make workers' lives work for them. Both parties are corporatist...one just doesn't hide it.
The answer, if there is one, is local action that grows from citizen action. Nothing will change at the national or state level without, in the words of Frederick Douglass, "a demand."
You nailed the heart of it,the quiet theft of what used to be shared prosperity. We’ve turned roofs, food, and even education into financial instruments, and the people who keep this country running are left with the bill. I agree,change won’t come from the top. It’ll start small, neighbor to neighbor, the way every real movement for dignity ever has.
As Margaret Mead wrote" "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful concerned citizens can change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has."
Change is coming. It will be bloody. It remains to be seen if the the theft of access to the "American Dream" can be prosecuted successfully.
Agreed. I left the U.S. for Sweden in 2019 because I saw this coming. My heart is still there, though, so I'm very active in U.S. politics, including volunteering for Democrats Abroad. I don't do this because I've vested my hope in Dems; I haven't and my money goes to food banks and mutual aid, not them. But I can work to make sure that every Americans overseas votes and that together we make the regime feel the pain. PS Lay off the Jameson, it's not good for you.
Thank you for this piece, it is excellent as always. I absolutely agree with your point and had never been able to express it so cleanly. I've experienced party politics as a voter and as a volunteer and have felt all of this, from the PAC supported Dem telling me they totally want to end Citizens United, but never signing on to a bill to do so; to an elected Dem telling me I should join the party "we need young people like you in it" as he literally tears up the flyer I handed him and tells me that my issues don't matter. It was the same attitude I hear in Jim Clyburn referring to stepping down as ending his life.
It is entitlement, it is ossification, it is hierarchy, and no small measure of greed.
But it is also dependence. After all, while they take PAC donations even the richest PACs are still a fraction. They need our $15 to make up the difference and to feed their armies of consultants and hangers on. That's why they spent $400k per day on the Vegas dome so that we would think they were fighting and contribute more. I absolutely agree with you about focusing on the organizations doing the work, and I hope that if we truly end small dollar donations, boycott ActBlue if you will, then that too will send a message or at least force them to be clear where their priorities really lie.
Thank you for this thoughtful comment. Everything you described, the contradictions, the dismissiveness, the sense that the hierarchy matters more than the people it is supposed to serve, is exactly why so many of us feel something fundamental has to change. You have seen it up close, both as a voter and a volunteer, and that experience carries weight.
The dependence you mention is real too. For all the PAC money floating around, they still rely on small donors to keep the whole machine running, to fund the consultants, to maintain the illusion of energy and fighting. The Vegas dome was the perfect example of that, a 400k per day production designed more to inspire contributions than genuine confidence.
Focusing support on organizations that actually do the work is the right instinct. And if enough people redirect their small dollar donations, then yes, it forces clarity. Either priorities shift, or they finally have to admit what their priorities really are.
Thanks again for adding your voice. It sharpens the point.
At this point I'm so disgusted by what I have seen supporting the Dems, and the nagging suspicion that they are blowing the cash so badly they need volunteers more than ever that I am determined to make my effort count. Thank you for putting the point so clearly you hit the nail on what has been bugging me so very much.
Helping those who need it and starving the beast is a win win.
What Schumer did is not “negotiation.” It is triage by spreadsheet. Twenty-four million people’s lungs, livers, and chemo scans are put on the table as a symbolic chip so a donor-soaked gerontocracy can say they “fought” while making damn sure nothing fundamental changes.
This is what it looks like when a party that once pretended to represent workers now represents the people who profit from workers staying desperate. They are not negotiating with Republicans, they are negotiating with reality: how much human suffering can we tolerate before it endangers fundraising.
Elizabeth Wick will die, and her insurance company will save $30-40K. That is not “worth it.” That is leadership declaring our very lives acceptable collateral. You do not get to light people on fire, then send a fundraising email about how bravely you held the hose.
So, yes, I will vote as a harm reductionist. I am not suicidal. But my power is not my ballot; it is my refusal to keep feeding a machine that treats my $15 as moral cover for donor capture.
Starve the national email vampires. Feed your tenant unions, mutual aid pods, strike funds, primary challengers, and school board fights. If trust is infrastructure, the Democratic Party has jackhammered the bridge. We will have to build a new crossing ourselves.
What the hell are we doing if we do anything less‽
Thumbs up Tom.
Just wrote an essay saying pretty much the same (won't be out until early December)....
It's really not worth an individual's time to engage with national politics beyond the ballot box. Those people are up to shenanigans that are beyond our control.
It is locally where we have a chance at having a voice. First in our homes, through thoughtful conversation with family. Then in our communities, with thoughtful conversations with friends and neighbors, local shopkeepers and service providers, even local civil servants. That's where most of us would be most effective.
Some may have a wider, larger platform, but even those who have contact with the city hall or the county seat or the state house, if they live in your community, you can have local access and express and work on local evolution and improvement.
Always say the same thing, 20-mile radius of your hearth. That's where you're going to be the most effective and the most satisfied with your contribution.
Thanks for these thoughts.
Cheers,
revel.
The extend to which money distorts politics (especially USA politics) is utterly disturbing.
So much truth here, Tom. Thank you for the dose of reality. We've been waiting relentlessly it seems.
In the end, if we think globally and act locally, we can indeed be the change, perhaps create a new foundation for the future of our kids.
In this moment, the tragedy of settling for a promise of a vote that we know will never come, the heartbreak of knowing how many people will suffer without continued subsidies. It's horrific. And surely, it's the last straw in terms of supporting our party. Of believing in promises. Of endlessly contributing to more of the same.
It's time to create. To strategize within our communities. To bring power back to the people where it belongs. The power is there if we learn to channel it wisely.
"Gradualism in theory is perpetuity in practice."
~ abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison
...and the truth will set you free Brother.
I'll add only that when I canvassed for HRC in 2016, I learned two things. People don't want to answer the door, and don't want to receive multiple calls from the same person. Disorganization, as much as anything cost Dem's that election. The sick feeling I had that night is still in my stomach. There's a saying about continuing to do the same thing, yet expecting a different result.
Really truthful, and moving, piece. So much so that I will spare you my tirade on Obamacare. I agree that the Democratic Party needs a dramatic change in leadership and to run on a platform to rebuild the middle class and to root out corporate and political corruption. Thanks, TJ!
Thank you. And I hear you. What you’re saying is exactly what so many people are feeling but rarely say out loud: the party can’t just manage decline anymore. It needs a real course correction, real leadership, and a real commitment to working people instead of donors and consultants.
If we’re going to rebuild the middle class and clean out the rot, it starts with telling the truth the way you just did and demanding a party that’s worthy of the people it claims to represent.
We must still win local House seats to stop the madness. I had NO hope we would have fair elections next year, but people shamed me by showing they want us to fight on 11/4/25.
People should be recruiting the most substantive, charismatic, youngish and activated candidates in every House District to primary the too frightened, clueless and purchased incumbent Dems. This is still local organizing. We must fight and take back the House and the party for the people.
Yes. The fight isn’t over,it’s just coming home. What happens in each district, each community, each precinct, will decide not only the House but the soul of the party. Local organizing isn’t just strategy,it’s survival. The people have spoken: no more waiting for permission to lead.
Tom: "Organize."
Me: Oh, you're getting it. You're getting it!
Tom: "I know it sounds like I’m saying ... that we should give up on the system entirely. That's not what I'm saying."
Me: Ah, you were so close! So close!
This piece is a clarion call. I’ve long known the Democratic Party can’t steer this ship toward anything that thrives—it simply can’t. Even with good intentions, every move within U.S. politics is circumscribed by the global logic of extraction. It’s a system nested in scarcity, performance, and profit.
What you’re describing at the end of your piece—local organizing, mutual aid, refusal to comply with systemic cruelty—isn’t just pragmatic. It’s the real work. It’s transforming the failed promises of modernity into something else. Something relational. Something that stitches us back into the fabric of the wider, living world that we've long separated ourselves from.
I’m starting to almost welcome this collapse. Not the hurt and pain it involves - of course, not that.... but it is an invitation to root where we are. To build what can’t be bought. To prepare the ground for what might come after this long, strange fever breaks.
great post, Tom. Remember how the Harlem Globetrotters brought a team with them, the Washington Generals (also known as the New York Nationals, the Boston Shamrocks, the Atlantic City Seagulls, etc.) so it looks like there is a game being played, when it's really as much an exhibition as a WWF event? One time they accidentally one, in 1971, under the name the New Jersey Reds. The Globetrotters were running out the clock when one of the Reds stole the ball and scored. It was all in the script, and the fans hated it.
The Democratic party is that team. They have the same sponsors, the same goals. Their biggest hero, Barack Obama, gifted their largest donors and never challenged the status quo. Biden was so busy trying to repair the damage Trump caused in his first term nobody bothered to see that he, too, was gifting the billionaires. They are track to transfer more than ten trillion dollars to the 400 controlling families by the end of the decade. They do not give a fuck if everybody but them dies by starvation, disease, or (preferably) acts of violence as they fight for the scraps.
We came close in 2015 to mobilizing around a leader who took zero corporate dollars and almost managed to force the party machine to back him. They ratfucked him as bad as Truman's boys did Henry Wallace in 1944. They learned their lesson and in 2020 he wasn't allowed to get close because they ran spoilers, some of whom are now posing as "heroes of the people."
The major victories for regular people came from presidents who betrayed the machine that put them there: TR with the robber barons and warmongers who supported McKinley, FDR with the New York gentry that made him governor, JFK with the mob and the unions, and LBJ with the southern machine. Everyone else has been a company man. The system is functioning as designed. Jefferson and Madison had great rhetoric, but the goal was always to protect wealth and power above all else.
They call this democracy. I call it nominal democracy at best. It's oligarchy salted with bureaucracy, capitalist propaganda, racism, genocidal war-worship (thank you for your service you sucker of a minimum wage mercenary, and have fun grunting in a third world country sitting on a pile of oil, opium, rare earth minerals, or some other resource... we call it "fighting for our freedoms) and let's not forget Joel Osteen's version of prosperity Christianity. It was rotten from the start. "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal" was penned by a slave-owing rapist drunk on his own intellect who didn't believe men were created at all, let alone equal. All lies, but man they sure have a RING to them.
WE CAN DO BETTER.
Bulls-eye, Tom. Us out here trying to serve the basic needs of (gestures and pirouettes) just about everyone in what used to be called the middle class, have watched this unfold for years, accelerating especially since the turn of the century.
We have financialized every damn thing that used to make workers' lives work for them. Both parties are corporatist...one just doesn't hide it.
The answer, if there is one, is local action that grows from citizen action. Nothing will change at the national or state level without, in the words of Frederick Douglass, "a demand."
You nailed the heart of it,the quiet theft of what used to be shared prosperity. We’ve turned roofs, food, and even education into financial instruments, and the people who keep this country running are left with the bill. I agree,change won’t come from the top. It’ll start small, neighbor to neighbor, the way every real movement for dignity ever has.
As Margaret Mead wrote" "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful concerned citizens can change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has."
Change is coming. It will be bloody. It remains to be seen if the the theft of access to the "American Dream" can be prosecuted successfully.
I agree with you. Living in hope and watching this dog and pony show theater is more than useless. It's damaging.
No one is coming to save us. A lot of us will die. That's the reality of the situation now.
We're hunkered down, trying to help where we can locally but seeing the vastness of need is so great. So depressing.
I'm 73. It seems this is going to be what the rest of my life will look like. We'll do our best.
Agreed. I left the U.S. for Sweden in 2019 because I saw this coming. My heart is still there, though, so I'm very active in U.S. politics, including volunteering for Democrats Abroad. I don't do this because I've vested my hope in Dems; I haven't and my money goes to food banks and mutual aid, not them. But I can work to make sure that every Americans overseas votes and that together we make the regime feel the pain. PS Lay off the Jameson, it's not good for you.
Thank you for this piece, it is excellent as always. I absolutely agree with your point and had never been able to express it so cleanly. I've experienced party politics as a voter and as a volunteer and have felt all of this, from the PAC supported Dem telling me they totally want to end Citizens United, but never signing on to a bill to do so; to an elected Dem telling me I should join the party "we need young people like you in it" as he literally tears up the flyer I handed him and tells me that my issues don't matter. It was the same attitude I hear in Jim Clyburn referring to stepping down as ending his life.
It is entitlement, it is ossification, it is hierarchy, and no small measure of greed.
But it is also dependence. After all, while they take PAC donations even the richest PACs are still a fraction. They need our $15 to make up the difference and to feed their armies of consultants and hangers on. That's why they spent $400k per day on the Vegas dome so that we would think they were fighting and contribute more. I absolutely agree with you about focusing on the organizations doing the work, and I hope that if we truly end small dollar donations, boycott ActBlue if you will, then that too will send a message or at least force them to be clear where their priorities really lie.
Thank you for this thoughtful comment. Everything you described, the contradictions, the dismissiveness, the sense that the hierarchy matters more than the people it is supposed to serve, is exactly why so many of us feel something fundamental has to change. You have seen it up close, both as a voter and a volunteer, and that experience carries weight.
The dependence you mention is real too. For all the PAC money floating around, they still rely on small donors to keep the whole machine running, to fund the consultants, to maintain the illusion of energy and fighting. The Vegas dome was the perfect example of that, a 400k per day production designed more to inspire contributions than genuine confidence.
Focusing support on organizations that actually do the work is the right instinct. And if enough people redirect their small dollar donations, then yes, it forces clarity. Either priorities shift, or they finally have to admit what their priorities really are.
Thanks again for adding your voice. It sharpens the point.
Thank you for your original point and your reply.
At this point I'm so disgusted by what I have seen supporting the Dems, and the nagging suspicion that they are blowing the cash so badly they need volunteers more than ever that I am determined to make my effort count. Thank you for putting the point so clearly you hit the nail on what has been bugging me so very much.
Helping those who need it and starving the beast is a win win.
What Schumer did is not “negotiation.” It is triage by spreadsheet. Twenty-four million people’s lungs, livers, and chemo scans are put on the table as a symbolic chip so a donor-soaked gerontocracy can say they “fought” while making damn sure nothing fundamental changes.
This is what it looks like when a party that once pretended to represent workers now represents the people who profit from workers staying desperate. They are not negotiating with Republicans, they are negotiating with reality: how much human suffering can we tolerate before it endangers fundraising.
Elizabeth Wick will die, and her insurance company will save $30-40K. That is not “worth it.” That is leadership declaring our very lives acceptable collateral. You do not get to light people on fire, then send a fundraising email about how bravely you held the hose.
So, yes, I will vote as a harm reductionist. I am not suicidal. But my power is not my ballot; it is my refusal to keep feeding a machine that treats my $15 as moral cover for donor capture.
Starve the national email vampires. Feed your tenant unions, mutual aid pods, strike funds, primary challengers, and school board fights. If trust is infrastructure, the Democratic Party has jackhammered the bridge. We will have to build a new crossing ourselves.
What the hell are we doing if we do anything less‽