One thing I've noticed, anecdotally, is that local party participation isn't always as rewarding as one might hope. There is a lot of calcified behavior among those who have (in many ways, impressively) carried the torch forward during a deep lull in participation. So even if you do go and get very involved, there's more going on, culturally, than one might think. There's jockeying for power in a ridiculous way, almost self-harming (to the group) way. I've heard very clear reports of how that went on here, in my new(ish) adopted home: people who have come in for all the right reasons, to help and contribute and strengthen, are smeared and maligned for just trying. I hope this is changing, but I'm not sure that people are as ready to slip out of their egos as we might like to think they are. I would love to hear more about this, because I certainly don't think it's an insurmountable problem but it's a turnoff, indeed, to those who have the capacity to do enormous good but see a (frankly) "lame" democratic infrastructure that doesn't always understand its own blind spots and account for those human dynamics.
One thing I've noticed, anecdotally, is that local party participation isn't always as rewarding as one might hope. There is a lot of calcified behavior among those who have (in many ways, impressively) carried the torch forward during a deep lull in participation. So even if you do go and get very involved, there's more going on, culturally, than one might think. There's jockeying for power in a ridiculous way, almost self-harming (to the group) way. I've heard very clear reports of how that went on here, in my new(ish) adopted home: people who have come in for all the right reasons, to help and contribute and strengthen, are smeared and maligned for just trying. I hope this is changing, but I'm not sure that people are as ready to slip out of their egos as we might like to think they are. I would love to hear more about this, because I certainly don't think it's an insurmountable problem but it's a turnoff, indeed, to those who have the capacity to do enormous good but see a (frankly) "lame" democratic infrastructure that doesn't always understand its own blind spots and account for those human dynamics.
Great interview by Lauren Harper Roe:
Didi Kuo, Stanford Center Fellow, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
“Stable parties can organize collective identities and they can create the rules of the game for democracy itself to work.”