The Democratic Party helped create the oligarchical class, gifting burgeoning tech industrialists and their corporations too much money, too much power, and too many blank checks.
Unfortunately, American education regarding the actual nature of politics has only helped to obscure the machinations of how power works and protects itself. We are given, instead, a narrative involving personalities and drama plays that are more like soap operas than examinations of incentives and actual maneuvers. This leaves us, like many who take to social media to react to every Democratic capitulation and disappointment and scream “What’re you doing???”, to exist in an environment where what is actually happening is hidden behind a veil of easily embraceable stereotypes while conditions continue to deteriorate.
With the Democratic Party, we are told it is a liberal or “leftist” party made up of mostly open-minded, educated people, and that the party itself represents the interests of a pluralistic coalition, including people of color, women, gay and trans Americans, immigrants, and working people. The party preaches tolerance and acceptance and continues to advocate for a kinder, gentler America in which progress continues. It’s easier to understand this by comparing it to a corporate brand. For example, Target, which, up until recently, portrayed itself as a bright, cheery, welcoming environment for families and even the LGBTQ+ community (before, of course, the Right attacked the corporation and then Donald Trump was elected to a second term and Target infamously pulled back from this depiction).
Behind the branding, the Democratic Party, like every party before it, exists to represent a coalition of stakeholders. Yes, the groups listed make up its “under base,” but the party itself is more beholden to a collection of wealth class donors and corporate partners who supply the capital necessary to maintain and operate a national party and an endless number of projects, including strategy, communications, and changing of the law to benefit those shareholders. The make up of both the Democratic Party and the GOP is determined, as is their agendas, by a constant struggle between the shareholders and the under base of supporters, creating an everpresent friction in interests.
This is how it has always worked in American politics. The paradigm shifts in our parties, including the creation of new parties and the destruction of others, has represented changing interests and changing capture of the parties. Sometimes the parties are more beholden to the shareholders, as they are now, and other times the under base asserts more control and/or rebels, causing the party to shift, adapt, or perish. Presently, the Democratic Party, in a time of existential crisis, is way, way more beholden to its shareholders, leaving the vast majority of Americans without effective political representation. This tends to happen, predictably, when wealth inequality reaches historic levels and corruption spreads like a cancer.
Because Obama maintained control of the party, the machine is still in place despite obvious conflicts. The tech oligarchs his machine created turned from the Democratic Party at the first moment it was convenient while maintaining enough of a financial hold over the party in order to placate any resistance. This is why, unfortunately, rank and file Democrats still can’t really critique Musk or Bezos or offer regulation of AI. Their shareholders are still, to some extent, populated by the very people and very corporations that are attempting to destroy democracy.
It’s telling that Obama personally handpicked Hillary Clinton as his successor in 2016, telling Biden it was her turn and advising him not to run, and then helped to curb Sanders’s challenge in the process. When Biden won in 2020, Obama helped facilitate it and many members of his personal braintrust continued their work in that administration. Then, Biden bowed out in 2024, and who was there to help Kamala Harris and to help direct the hastily put together operation? The Obama folks.
Meanwhile, those in Obama’s circle used their connections with the machine’s shareholders to secure lucrative jobs on the boards and within the corporate structures of the tech oligarchs they helped to create in the first place. This is why Obama stalwarts like David Plouffe and Jim Messina end up getting paid handsomely by corporations like Uber. Then, when they return to Democratic politics, their advice and strategy reflects the corporate interests of the business that actually pays them more money than the Democratic Party, because it is essentially insider-lobbying. What do you get? A Harris Campaign that never really mentioned the growing power and influence of the tech oligarchs, that never dared to challenge the worsening status quo, and a celebration of Wall Street. Because the Harris Campaign was nestled within the Obama Machine, helmed in part by Obama Machine veterans, and still dedicated to the shareholders that were actively making conditions worse.
