Yeah. They were both full of corrupt dinosaurs, and when the GOP leadership shut out the youthful idiots, they banged down the door and organized and demanded to be heard. When the Democratic leadership shut down the youthful people with new ideas and a lot more un-corrupt morality than the DNC had, those young people by and large just said “ok lol fuck politics then.” We have a handful of exceptions in Washington but I feel like a whole lot of the left-wing politically active people just don’t want to engage with anything “political” at this point.

I feel like part of it is that the young progressives expect their leaders to be decent people, and so they get affronted and don’t want to play anymore when it becomes clear that they’re not. The young Republicans don’t have a problem with it, they’ll happily vote in lock step with some of the worst people on the planet as long as they can eventually have a space to join their ranks.

Political parties need to die off (with the DNC as like exhibits 1, 2, and 3). The function they perform can be done by union leadership, state-level political collectives, STAR based voting for individual candidates, fuckin’ coordination in a subreddit, I don’t know. I get how they arose because of FPTP voting because we’re still using 18th century voting tech, but it is time for them to go and for whatever structural elements that provide advantage and enablement for them to go with them.