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The Clinton Machine's vicious, amoral, greedy Yuppies can't cram this Genie back in the bottle...
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Response to COLGATE4 (Reply #26)
And the only possible way it can move forward, absolutely the only way, is a full-scale drive to build a third major party.
Personal, I'd take the plunge and go with 'Liberal Democratic Party of the United States.' (Bernie Sanders's candidacy has taught us, among many things, that American voters are actually more than OK with straight talk and the straight-up announcement that it's a liberal party would be a direct challenge to the DFL's careful avoidance of such terms, using innuendo and weasel-words in their place).
It would field some candidates in areas with conservative Democrats in cases where progressive candidates would potentially be viable, or where Republicans are vulnerable to genuinely liberal/progressive candidates (Bernie's done us all a phenomenal service demonstrating how disaffected Republicans who realize that the party they've voted for actually doesn't give a crap about them will seriously consider liberal alternatives, so long as it's perfectly clear just exactly what 'liberal' means to them. The party's Congressional and Senate members would caucus with the DFL, but hold the line on matters critical to the liberal/progressive agenda of the party. In other cases it would endorse DFL candidates directly. And a Presidential candidate would be a long-term goal, not an immediate one.
The infrastructure exists, just broken up right now into a great many individual organizations and single-issue groups. Most are unlikely to achieve their goals substantially in the context of the current corporate/finance controlled Democratic party infrastructure.
The idea of challenging 'establishment/conservative' Democrats from within the party is a tempting one. It's also not going to get anywhere. We've seen what the corporate media can do to silence liberal/progressive candidates - it wields immense power within the party. But we've also seen, not just through this campaign 'season' but throughout the world, the power if the Internet as an organizing, crowdsourcing, and fundraising tool. It can be used to coordinate extremely efficient field work, and both muster and deliver resources rapidly to where they're required.
I may be wrong, but I don't believe that the Democratic party of 2016 is seriously vulnerable to widespread challenges of candidates whose agendas actually roughly align with its formal platform. It's dominated by interests whose agendas are directly at odds with the historic platform of the party, and the entire campaign finance system is based on corporate sponsorship of the party's candidates, guaranteeing that all considerations other than electing candidates are just window-dressing.
To succeed, it would have to be a tremendous undertaking, unprecedented in its scope in the history of American politics, and require a lot of smart, brave, and dedicated people to endure a lot of 'fails' in order to break through with initially small numbers of wins.
I'm in. Any group activity worth doing begins with those words. Easy words to say, but for a project like this they shouldn't be spoken lightly. It would require a massive amount of work, a lot of very sharp people who might consider taking on the mantle of leadership, and patience.
And it would be the political party equivalent of the rare genuinely 'employee-owned company.' It would be financed by hard working people who would be willing to both commit resources to the effort and be a part of it.
Any thoughts? 
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