this post was submitted on 28 May 2024
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Carlin is fundamentally wrong here, because he starts with the premise that national politics spring out of nothingness. That's simply not true. In almost all cases, people that are successful at national politics start at a local level. So when you want to change things, you must start locally. That means getting good candidates elected to local offices, and them moving them up to state office, and eventually to national.
Okay, yes, I see what you mean and can agree. Still I believe that this can only bring about meaningful change if it's part of an activist push for election reform.
The local level is important and easier to manage, because the power brokers, the keys to power are not that much more powerful than you are. But at a certain point the keys to power become way too influential. To reach the top in any party, you have to play by the parties rules and neither one will let you lessen their individual members influence. You would need wide ranging political agreement and cooperation (and good luck with that) or you have to change the game by redistributing power away from big players and back to the people. And that can imho. not be achieved in a highly partisan two-party system.
Or, maybe it can be, but the odds are incredibly stacked against you.
That's still tied to the grass-roots level. The party largely can't get candidates for higher office without them coming up through the system in some way. That means that the people at a local level can greatly influence state-level politics, which in turn influences national politics. But the problem you'll run into is that there are a lot of competing interests within a state, and as a single person starts to represent the views of more and more people, they need to reflect the average of those views--or be an exceptionally charismatic leader that can pull people along in their wake. It's not that the party isn't "letting" you play if you don't do things their way, it's that you simply won't have the votes.
Yes, there's a lot of money involved, and it's true that you either need to have a really strong grass-roots funding game, or else you're gonna end up owing rich people and corporations favors. So your issue is that you need to get enough people to give a shit locally, and when you do, they end up playing by your rules. Or, more correctly, the rules of the people you represent.
This is precisely how Trump won, BTW, and how he's come to own the Republican party. That's how populism works. He gave a voice--a hateful voice--to about 1/6 of the American population (about 1/3 of the Republican party), and despite traditional Republican interests being heavily stacked against him, he managed to entirely take over the party.