Two recent developments — an unimportant one concerning me at the Democratic Party’s lowest level and a very important one concerning the president at its summit — could have been scenes from Daniel Schlozman and Sam Rosenfeld’s important new book The Hollow Parties: The Many Pasts and Disordered Present of American Party Politics.

Earlier this year, I did something that would have baffled and dismayed an earlier version of me. I successfully petitioned to become one of my neighborhood’s representatives to the Brooklyn Democratic Party county committee. It was one of the easiest things I’ve done in over twenty years of practical political activity. Working with a group that recruits progressive activists to run for one of the committee’s thousands of vacant seats, I got a list of registered Democrats living in the few blocks around my apartment building, knocked on neighbors’ doors, and collected a handful of petition signatures. Since the incumbent party leadership did not recruit its own slate of committee candidates in my neighborhood, I was automatically appointed to a seat and didn’t have to run for election in the Democratic Party primary. My only official responsibilities are to attend one or two meetings during my term and to vote on any matters that are brought to the committee by the county leadership.

Nobody in the incumbent leadership expects me to organize my neighbors, register voters, or educate people about city, state, or national affairs. I plan to anyway. As an active member of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), an organization they fear and loathe, I doubt they’d want me to do those things even if they cared about them. They do not seem to mind that the party has no organized presence in the day-to-day lives of its constituents or that it’s widely regarded as a den of dysfunction. Power is concentrated in the hands of the party chair, who maintains her position through a combination of procedural chicanery and petty patronage.¹ The party doesn’t even commit itself to seemingly essential functions like helping Democrats defeat Republicans in general elections. Its first new campaign expenditures in years were deployed in this year’s primary elections against district leader candidates not aligned with the incumbent county leadership.² Under their watch, Democrats have lost once-reliable seats in Brooklyn’s southern reaches and allowed Republican candidates to win enough votes to put statewide offices like the governorship in play. They are demonstrably harming the Democratic Party’s electoral prospects in New York, but unless reformers can win a majority of the nearly four thousand county committee seats and the forty-two district leader positions, there is little anyone can do about this sorry situation.