One of my radicalizing events was in 2016, when I was a delegate for Bernie at the Colorado caucus. (I can't recall exactly what level, but there were probably 200 people in the room.

The Hillary folks controlled the stage and completely ignored the Bernie crowd's calls of "point of order!", throwing out the rules to rush through their agenda despite the wishes of (more than?) half the crowd.

I know Bernie has a lot of detractors, and the calls of "socialist!" scare a lot of people off. But still, the process should have happened. I still think he had a real shot of winning 2016, because people were ready to overturn the system and the Dems establishment didn't see it. So instead many people who wanted that revolution turned to the other person who promised to burn it all down. Maybe I'm libbing out, but _I want to believe_.

I got incredibly ill for days after that experience, likely from the fact that there were a lot of folks yelling and sharing germs in a closed room, but also from the sheer stress of seeing the establishment flagrantly violate Robert's Rules when it served them, and state it as law when that served them instead.

I'm still mad. Thanks for sharing your experience.

This is a good essay despite the fact that it has literally nothing to do with anarchism. It's a great look into what the sausage is like when you're on the bottom rung of the organized political process and how messy and frustrating everything really is.

This was fun. It's exactly the level of incompetence that we'd expect from the democrats. Depressing.

Glad to know major political parties also invest in dysfunctional software.

> We’re supposed to take seriously these people saying that democracy is at risk if we don’t vote, but they’re so apathetic about who wins that they’ll help any Democrat become president who pays them? Mind-boggling. “Blue no matter who,” truly.)

Wonderfully put, I think this is something that’s true for both political sides, we’re moving closer and closer to a reality where both sides just want their color to win, and are completely closed off to any change.

I went to a 2016 NV caucus with my wife at a nearby elementary school. After an hour of waiting in line, we finally got inside and saw why it was taking so long. The volunteers were signing people in on ipads, and they had no idea how to use them. They were mostly older people and had trouble with the website. My wife and I literally took out our phones, copied the URL, and started signing people in with our personal phones. We processed people 4 to 1 compared to the actual volunteers. It's ridiculous how disorganized it was, and how unprepared the volunteers were. The ensuing chaos at the county and state conventions made me swear I wouldn't do anything with the NV Democratic Party again. I changed my registration and everything.

Then came Trump 2.0 and I swallowed my pride and decided I had to do something.

My wife and I volunteered to do outreach with the party. We showed up at a coffee shop and nobody was there. Eventually we saw someone who looked like they were volunteering too, and we asked if they were. They said yea and handed us some letters to sign saying like "Vote for Kamala because I am too". Again, really disorganized and disheartening to someone who actually wants to help. Who knows if those letters were even mailed.

If this is representative of the Democratic parties in other states, it's no wonder millions of people didn't show up to vote for Kamala.

What I find very interesting about some of the election post mortems, and there is an echo of this in this essay too: Poland had a similar political crisis just a few years ahead of the US. A "Trumpist" party, funnily enough called PiS, took over from a fairly successful and liberal centrist coalition, and held on to power over quite a few nationwide elections. There were so many commonalities: abortion rights, strongman government, convicted criminals in government, etc.

The key reason why the fairly competent, liberal and inclusive agenda lost time after time was that the people promoting it felt so self-important with their advanced degrees and great pedigrees that they felt that should be enough to win. That it will be enough to remind the voters that the other side is Bad and that's job done. The PiS party, in turn, was incredibly good at reaching voters, they spent ages building grassroots structures, including in unglamorous rural areas, where they remain very popular now. They have cohesive, very populist, but clear and catchy slogans nad programs. They have cultural clubs, newspapers, TV channels, everything.

The good news (if you're liberal) is that the centrist parties finally got organized, ran a common election platform and campaigned beyond "surely, you'll just all vote for us because we bothered to turn up to your smelly little town". Although whether they learnt they have to do that every time remains to be seen.

Jesse recruited me to run early vote and caucus locations in 2020. He was bright and a hard worker. It was my second time volunteering for a campaign, and the chaos and workload he describes are accurate. Campaigns are organized chaos—like setting up a large event full of unknowns, which makes things more reactionary than I’d expected.

Each cycle, most of the field organizers are young, passionate, and inexperienced; some inevitably wash out. Many see it as a rite of passage to a political career and tolerate the frenzy. Those looking to advance politically often aim for a role with more responsibility in the next cycle.

This was the state party in a relatively small state, which mostly shuts down between elections. Twice, I saw them scale up to an impressively large organization, rally an army of volunteers, and then dissolve it all after the campaign—everyone exhausted but with a real sense of accomplishment. Campaign work seems less like a job and more like a military campaign. Or a startup.