What is "the Democratic establishment" anyway?

American political parties are really weak

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Biden’s former Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre has been in the news this week because she’s doing a book tour for her new memoir Independent and sharing some views on the past, present, and future of the Democratic Party.

Those views are going down like a lead balloon, mostly because she insists that it was disrespectful and wrong for anyone to have pressured Joe Biden to leave the presidential race last year. She also says that it was equally disrespectful for anyone to suggest Kamala Harris ought not to have been the nominee or that she should face a primary, even though Jean-Pierre admits in the same book that she never thought Harris would win.¹

This is all being litigated a million times over in the media, and I’m not going to get into it except to comment on one puzzling aspect of the whole conversation. This is that throughout her book, Jean-Pierre is constantly savaging “the Democratic establishment” for destroying Biden’s career and forcing him out of the race. But who even is the Democratic establishment, anyway? And as Press Secretary to the Democratic president, doesn’t Jean-Pierre count as a member of it?

These questions point us to a puzzling aspect of American political parties, which is that they barely exist as organized entities. Sure, there’s an infrastructure of fundraising and organizing housed in entities like the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. These are bodies that I usually refer to as the “institutional Democratic Party”. But these bodies aren’t really providing leadership in the sense of coming up with policy ideas or coordinating national strategy.

Much of the activity of bodies like this takes place at the state level - things like voter registration drives, local fundraising, and the like. But with 50 state party organizations and even more at the county level, it’s not like that all of these bodies get together to form some sort of strategic brain trust. They mostly focus on their local affairs, and even then much of their work ends up being to provide services and advice to campaigns led by the people who win primaries.

To take a recent example, it’s not like all the folks who work or volunteer in the New York City Democratic Party got together and decided Zohran Mamdani was going to be the party’s nominee for mayor. Instead, he came kind of out of nowhere, ran a primary that many didn’t expect him to win, and now they’ll help him out in the general election campaign.

And this kind of gets to the nub of the issue and back to Jean-Pierre’s point. There are certainly various people who work for the institutional Democratic Party who are more or less career party bureaucrats. But are they “the establishment”? Were they the ones who ran a pressure campaign to kick Joe Biden out of the race? For that matter, were they the ones covering up his incapacity before he was being told to get out of the race? The answers are no, no, and no.