Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Florida), chair of the Democratic National Committee, on stage at the start of the Democratic presidential debate hosted by CNN in Las Vegas, October 13, 2015. (Photo: Josh Haner / The New York Times)
Sometime between now and the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Philadelphia, there will almost certainly be a deal between the Sanders forces and the Clinton forces. The $64,000 question is: What are the forces of progress going to get out of the deal?
Here’s what I hope will be in the deal: a set of agreements to make the Democratic Party more democratic — in particular, to make the party more transparent and accountable to the public.
As should be obvious to everyone by now, there’s a set of parallel questions for the Republican Party, and the two influence each other: the anti-democratic attributes of the one are invoked as an excuse for the anti-democratic features of the other, and efforts to overturn the anti-democratic features of the one embolden efforts to overturn the anti-democratic features of the other. We now live, for better and for worse, in a two-party system, a legally mandated duopoly, in which a person who wants to fully participate in US democracy has to choose one of the two parties to participate in; and that means that each of the two parties has a quasi-governmental character, and therefore that the public has the right to expect that the two parties will not be allowed to function like private clubs.
A good place to start would be to make the DNC more transparent and accountable, as if it were a quasi-governmental body, which it is. Instead of being an Academy Awards ceremony, it would be a venue where real democracy publicly takes place. The proposed party platform would be published in advance, and proposed amendments to the platform would be published in advance, to give the public the…