Think of it as Yoga for the brain, we are going to stretch a bit.
Why Does the DNC Keep Sabotaging Its Own People — and Why Superdelegates Are Just Elitism
When a party needs superdelegates to protect itself from its own voters, it is no longer defending democracy — it is managing the illusion of it. -- YNOT!
Let me start here: this is not an endorsement of Tulsi Gabbard, RFK Jr., Bernie Sanders, Biden, Harris, Trump, or Hillary Clinton. If America had better choices, I probably would not have voted for any of them.
But this is not really about one candidate.
This is about a political machine that keeps pretending to be “for the people” while building trap doors under the people’s feet.
Tulsi Gabbard always seemed independent. You may disagree with her. You may not trust her. You may not like her politics. But there was something about her that felt genuine. And that is exactly why the party machine saw her as dangerous.
When she ran as a Democrat, every time she got close to the debate stage, the rules seemed to move. The DNC said the process was fair, but to millions of people watching, it looked like the insiders were protecting the club from an outsider. PBS reported in 2020 that new debate thresholds likely ruled Gabbard out of the March debate. (PBS)
And they did the same thing to Bernie Sanders.
Bernie was not the party’s chosen son. He was too populist, too independent, too connected to young voters, and too hard to control. The question I still have is simple: why stay inside a party that keeps proving it will only let you win if the bosses approve?
This goes back decades. After George McGovern won the Democratic nomination in 1972 and then lost 49 states, party leaders decided regular voters could not be fully trusted. So they created a safety valve for the insiders: superdelegates. These are elected officials and party leaders who get automatic convention power because of who they are, not because voters chose them in that primary. The system began after the party’s post-1972 and post-1980 panic over “activist” nominees and outsider energy. (Wikipedia)
That is not democracy. That is elitism with a nice name.
The message is: “Vote all you want, but if you people get too excited about the wrong candidate, we have adults in the room who can fix it.”
Then came 2016, and people saw even more of the machine. Donna Brazile later admitted she shared CNN town hall topics with the Clinton campaign. That helped cement the belief that the process was not neutral. (The Guardian)
The DNC eventually limited superdelegates after the 2016 backlash, barring them from voting on the first ballot in contested conventions. But they did not eliminate the insider structure. They just made it look less ugly. (Axios)
And yes, Republicans have their own party bosses and their own backroom games. But their delegate system is different. Republican automatic delegates are generally bound by state results on the first ballot, while Democratic superdelegates historically had far more freedom. That difference helped make an insurgent like Trump possible in the Republican Party and much harder in the Democratic Party. (Time)
So when Democrats talk about tyranny, they should also look inside their own house.
Because tyranny is not only a dictator with a uniform or a ballroom.
Sometimes tyranny is a committee. Sometimes it is a rule change.
Sometimes it is a debate threshold.
Sometimes it is a donor class deciding the voters are too emotional, too young, too working-class, too independent, or too inconvenient to be trusted.
America used to feel more hopeful. It felt like we were building something that mattered, something we could pass down to our children. But when both parties become machines, and the people are treated like props, that hope starts to rot.
The DNC keeps sabotaging its own people because the machine would rather lose with control than win with someone it cannot own.
And that is the real problem, the system wont properly when 50% is rigged and the other 50% is unchecked.
