Just before starting to write my lament about what a dramatic step backward the recent campaign for Democratic National Committee chair had been, I opened an Our Revolution email that told me, “We beat back the Party establishment at the DNC.” Now Our Revolution being a direct organizational descendent of the 2020 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, and me having been a 2016 Sanders convention delegate, I feel pretty confident that our ideas of who “we” means are pretty much the same. So what accounts for the widely divergent takes?

For those who haven’t been following this, Minnesota’s Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party Chair Ken Martin was just elected to lead the DNC for the next four years, defeating Wisconsin Democratic Party Chair Ben Wikler by a 246.5–134.5 vote margin. There was no contested election four years ago, because by tradition a just-elected president selects the new chair; contested elections generally follow defeats. In the last one, in 2017, former Obama Administration Secretary of Labor Tom Perez won the job, beating Minnesota Representative Keith Ellison in a second round of voting, 235–200.

Ellison’s candidacy came in the wake of his having been just the second member of Congress to support Sanders in the prior year’s presidential primaries, and the fact that Sanders people harbored serious grievances with the DNC over its perceived favoritism for the ultimate nominee, Hillary Clinton, lent a distinct edge to the election, bringing it considerably more buzz than the one that just occurred. At the time, former Massachusetts Representative Barney Frank, a vociferous opponent of Sanders’s run — who had once declared “the most effective thing liberals and progressives can do to advance our public policy goals … is to help Clinton win our nomination early in the year” — now thought there was “a great deal to be said for putting an active Sanders supporter in there,” so as to clear the air “of suspicions and paranoia.” But Clinton and Barack Obama apparently didn’t think so and Clinton’s past Obama Cabinet colleague, Perez took up the torch in a race that produced a level of grassroots involvement seldom if ever before seen in this contest.

“More importantly, it raises a serious question for those of us who believe that the structure and history of the American political system require the left’s engagement in the Democratic Party”

Although the office is traditionally considered organizational rather than ideological and the 2017 candidates did run on those issues, the underlying political differences were obvious to all. This time around, the race was generally understood to involve little if any political disagreement on the issues. By way of explaining its support for new party chair Martin, Our Revolution characterized runner-up Wikler, as “an establishment candidate backed by Nancy Pelosi, Hakeem Jeffries, and Chuck Schumer, and bankrolled by the billionaire class.” We understand that election campaigns are about sharpening the perception of differences between the candidates, but still this seems a rather thin flimsy basis for hailing the vote as an anti-establishment triumph, given that Martin has publicly stated that he doesn’t want the party to take money from “those bad billionaires” only from “good billionaires;”and one of the two billionaires who gave a quarter million dollars to Wikler’s campaign was George Soros — probably the DNC’s model “good billionaire.” Besides, Musk/Bezos/Zuckerberg probably aren’t thinking of donating anyhow. Oh, and Chuck Schumer actually supported Ellison eight years ago.

Actually, “we” did have a horse in the race — 2020 Sanders campaign manager Faiz Shakir. Shakir, who has been running a non-profit news organization called More Perfect Union, dedicated to “building power for the working class,” argued that Democrats needed a pitch for building a pro-worker economy to go with their criticism of Trump’s policy proposals. His viewpoint presented a serious alternative to that of Martin, who told a candidates forum that “We’ve got the right message … What we need to do is connect it back with the voters,” — seemingly a tough position to maintain following an election in which NBC’s ten state exit polling showed the majority of voters with annual household incomes under $100,000 voting Republican, while the majority of those from over-$100,000 households voted Democrat. But even though Shakir was a DNC member and thereby able to get the 40 signatures of committee members needed to run, he entered the race far too late to be taken for a serious contender and ultimately received but two votes.

Mind you, none of this critique comes as a criticism of the work of the two state party chairs who were the principal contenders. Martin touts the fact that Democrats have won every statewide election in Minnesota in the fourteen years that he has chaired the party and anyone who understands the effort that goes into political campaign work can only admire that achievement. Nor is Our Revolution to be criticized for taking the time to discern what they thought would be the best possible option in a not terribly exciting race that was nevertheless of some importance.

At the same time it’s hard not to regret the diminished DNC presence of the “we” that Our Revolution spoke of, after “we” legitimately contended for power in the last contested election. Certainly this lack of interest was in no small part a consequence of the extraordinary circumstances that produced a presidential nominee who had not gone before the voters in a single primary — for the first time since Hubert Humphrey in 1968.

More importantly, it raises a serious question for those of us who believe that the structure and history of the American political system require the left’s engagement in the Democratic Party — uncomfortable and unpleasant as that may be at times. As the social scientists like to say, politics abhors a vacuum, and absent a national Democratic Party presence for the perspective that motivated the Sanders campaigns, people seeking action on the big questions on the big stage may start to look elsewhere. And elsewhere always looms the possibility of the cul-de-sac of yet another third party candidacy that holds interesting conventions and debates, but ultimately receives only a small share of vote, but a large share of the blame for the election of a Republican president.

At the moment there is no one obviously positioned to take up the Sanders mantle in the 2028 presidential campaign. But we may have to make it our business to find one.

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