Death of a Political Machine

Welcome to the oligarchy. Here's how they dismantled us, and how we can do it to them.

Welcome to the oligarchy. Today’s topic is about how the GOP killed the Democratic political machine. This is the 2nd volume in my Roadmap to Victory series. You can see the first post here.

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Every political machine, including many governments themselves, relies on a number of things, but the biggest one (& the one we’ll talk about today) is what we’ll call their Keys to Power. Later, we’ll discuss the overarching ways to dismantle a political machine.

KEYS TO POWER

Ideology without power is nothing more than us running our mouths. Progressive populists fundamentally fight for FDR’s 2nd Bill of Rights (which guarantees all Americans the right to a decent job, a living wage, healthcare, housing, social security, and education). Without power, we’ll never complete our mission of reviving and ensuring the American Dream for all.

As such, we must hyperfocus on building and taking power. We must both build power within ourselves and chip away at the power of the GOP elites. To do this, we must build our Keys to Power and remove theirs. 

Keys to Power (KOPs) are how a person, organization, or government gains and maintains power. KOPs can involve people, money, rules, etc. 

In dictatorships, they are often the elite, the donors, the funders, etc. That’s why all the resources usually flow to their KOP, i.e., their elite.

In (healthy) democracies, KOPs are the voters, the people, etc. That’s why many of their resources support the masses and not just the elites.

Seeing that nearly half of Texans (and Americans) live paycheck to paycheck, I think we all know the resources aren’t flowing to the people, but the debt sure is.

I agree with President Biden and Senator Sanders that we now essentially live in an oligarchy, especially seeing the disastrous results of Citizens United and unlimited dark money in our politics.

With this concept in mind, let’s look at how KOPs shaped political parties in Texas.

In the recent past, once someone became the Democratic nominee, usually a group like the Trail Lawyers, a union, or a business would give that candidate a check to fund their campaign. When LBJ was a Congressman, his two main KOPs were his extremely pro-FDR district and his friendship with Herman Brown, the businessman who financed him and his rise to power.

When the GOP took over Texas, the first thing they did was greatly diminish the Democrat's KOPs. Here’s what they did:

• Voter suppression: They gerrymandered us into oblivion, and they employ other tactics to suppress the vote.

• Stronger logistics: They have modern-day Robber Barons, from the West Texas Barons to the Tech Bro Oligarchs, which gives them stronger logistics than Democrats do. “Logistics,” in this case, are funds that can be used to support volunteers, buy ads, hire organizers, etc.

  • Diminish Democratic groups: Logistics are all relative. Sometimes, you can improve your logistics by harming your opponents. For instance, the TX GOP gutted trial lawyers by limiting their incomes, made it harder for unions to build membership, and punished (and still punishes) groups aligned with Democrats.

• Devastating messaging: Their dog whistle messaging, developed during Nixon/Reagan’s Southern Strategy, effectively broke apart FDR’s New Deal Coalition. The core aspect of their messaging is to focus people’s ire, fear, and other prejudices on each other and not the elites.

A point of personal privilege: had the old Texas Democratic Party (pre-1990s) *actually* passed laws to limit contribution limits, mandated a nonpartisan redistricting commission to stop extreme gerrymandering, and was more focused on fighting Republicans instead of themselves, we wouldn’t be in such a mess. We would still likely be a red state, but it would be more of a reasonable red and less batshit-crazy red. Progressive populists have long called for democratic reforms as we believe more democracy is better than less democracy. I talked more about the failings of the old party in my previous substack.

Diminish GOP Keys of Power

Just as they suppressed our KOPs, we must do the same to theirs. Here are a few overarching actions we can do to suppress the TX GOP’s Keys of Power:

• End hyperpartisan gerrymandering: Any new political maps need approval from the Texas House, Senate, Lieutenant Governor, and Governor. We can end hyperpartisan gerrymandering if we take and hold any of those by the next census year, 2030. Texas has (generally speaking up to this point) been trending in the right direction. 2024 was a bad year for all incumbent parties worldwide, so it’s too soon to know if 2024 was a fluke or a new pattern.

• Limit money in politics: There are two longshot hopes on the horizon, the first being Maine has a plan to bring Citizens United to the courts to argue that the decision was unlawful. Though an extreme long shot given our current Supreme Court, it’s at least something. The next extreme long shot is turning this into a bipartisan issue as the reasonable-ish TX GOP is struggling to push back against their Extreme Right that’s being financed by the West Texas Barons. To be clear, there’s no way such a law would pass in Texas as it currently is, but it is still an opening that we could exploit to cause more internal divisions within the TX GOP.

• Stretch their logistics thin: How do you eat an elephant? One bit at a time. There’s no silver bullet to defeating a political machine as well-oiled by the West Texas Barons. But nothing on Earth is infinite, including their funds and influence. It’s only a matter of time before they fall, as it admittedly is with all things, but our actions can hasten what’s to come. By putting them on the defense everywhere, we can speed up their eventual decline.

• Defuse their messaging: I’ll likely discuss this in a later post, but there’s some new research about how to reliably defuse their dog whistle messaging. The best way to defuse it is to expose it as a ploy to divide working people so the elites can continue to plunder our communities. These days, there’s little difference between a politician and a puppet. 

• Exploit their weaknesses: The GOP is a big tent party, albeit less of a big tent than the Democrats. Their factions don’t always get along. We’re already seeing signs of this as, nationally, the anti-immigration forces are clashing with the big business forces; in Texas, we see this as the pro-public education rural Republicans fighting with the West Texas Baron’s politician puppets. We must drive wedges between their factions as every opportunity arises. We don’t have to win the support of any of their factions, but the more they fight themselves, the better. The easiest way to destroy an opponent is to have them destroy themselves.

Build Democratic Keys of Power

While we must remove the GOP's Keys to Power, we must also build some of our own. To do this, we’ll need to rebuild and modernize the New Deal Coalition. We’ll discuss coalition building in a later post.

We will also need to convert voters to become Democrats. Many Texans still aren’t voting. Polls showed that nearly 40% of Texans do not vote — let’s call these folks the Non-Voting Party. Just shy of 50% are not feeling inspired by our messaging. We’ll learn more about how Progressive Populist Messaging is likely our best bet to reach these members of the “Non-Voting Party.”

But of course, a message is only as good as it can be delivered to people. We can find the perfect message, but it's useless if we cannot get it to folks. We will need strong, effective, and efficient logistics to ensure our messaging actually reaches people. Again, we’ll discuss this in my next volume.

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Please subscribe to stay tuned to the next edition of my Roadmap to Victory series. We’ll talk about messaging dynamics and some *actual and concrete* action steps to take. The only good plan is the one with actual action steps.

Stay strong.