Fascinating interview with a former Biden aide with insight into how they (and other politicians think):
What I found really interesting starts at 8:25. The guy talks about how centralized the party is and how everyone toes the line and it's enforced by a system of rewards and punishments. Here are some choice quotes:
"Our party is pretty adherent to the establishment. We're a team sport and you get punished when you don't toe the line or when you try to, you know, take a shortcut to your future... or when you don't regurgitate the talking points."
Later he's asked whether there are any delegates in the Democratic party willing to support someone else. To which he replies:
"You do that at your own peril. It depends who you are.... you know, it would probably take something like the Speaker, Senator Schumer, former President Clinton, former President Obama, together as a group... It would take a group of senior folks in the party like that to tell him that his continuing to run will hurt the party. I don't anticipate that happening... Look, it's a team sport. It's not fun that it has to be that way. But it's like that on both sides. There's a lot of punishment and reward, and so it would take a lot for that to happen."
Now, at first this seemed quite sad, but sensible. You have to toe the line to advance in any corporation so why not in politics?
But then I realized how toxic that is when the corporation we're talking about spans across 50 states and has a 50/50 chance of winning the monopoly on violence every 4 years. (And the corp that has the other 50% chance to win operates in the same way).
But how did we get here? From a theoretical standpoint, how did the national political parties get so powerful relative to grassroots movements and state level parties? Our system of democracy was designed to have a balance of power between federal, state, and local governments. How did the national parties become so powerful that everyone is scared to say that the emperor has no clothes? That they can run such a comprehensive system of punishments and rewards that people are afraid to say anything even when their voters are entirely local?
Then I realized, it boils down again to the monetary system. When the power to issue money is centralized, power becomes centralized. The centralization of power, caused by the centralization of money, is how we got to this Emperor Has No Clothes moment in our politics.
Happy orange pilling, people.