(Shahryar here....shaharazade has a little illness, nothing serious, and I'm swamped with work. She's authorized me to repost this open thread she wrote way back when the membership of c99 started booming, way back in March 2016. It's pretty wonky! And still timely, probably always will be.)

As a former Democrat who grew up under the political tutelage of my grand mother and my mother who were both FDR Democrat''s I no longer give a shit about the party. They were flaming liberals. My grandmothers dinning room had framed pictures of FDR's four freedoms and a portrait of Paul Robeson hanging on the wall. My grandmother was a self proclaimed socialist. My Dad used to say to my Mom 'Gretchen get off your liberal soapbox.' She took me and my grandmother to hear Eldritch Cleaver speak in the 60's. She loved Bobby Kennedy and worked for campaign here in Oregon. I did too it was my first foray into electoral Democratic politics.

So coming from this upbringing and being a radical liberal myself how did I get to the point where I flat out denounce the Democratic party and the party has no use for purist's far lefty's like me. I thought to myself today how did the Democratic party that's supposed to advocate Jeffersonian principles and FDR's New Deal get formed in the first place. So I took a timey whimey trip back to when it started.

The Democratic party as we know it was formed in 1828. Ironically the newly formed party's 1st president was Andrew Jackson. Jefferson said in 1824 of Jackson 'I feel much alarmed at the prospect of seeing General Jackson President. He is one of the most unfit men I know for such a place'.

From the online Encyclopedia Britannica
http://www.britannica.com/topic/Democratic-Party

The Democratic Party is the oldest political party in the United States and among the oldest political parties in the world. It traces its roots to 1792, when followers of Thomas Jefferson adopted the name Republican to emphasize their anti-monarchical views. The Republican Party, also known as the Jeffersonian Republicans, advocated a decentralized government with limited powers. The Federalists called Jefferson’s faction the Democratic-Republican Party in an attempt to identify it with the disorder spawned by the “radical democrats” of the French Revolution of 1789. After the Federalist John Adams was elected president in 1796, the Republican Party served as the country’s first opposition party, and in 1798 the Republicans adopted the derisive Democratic-Republican label as their official name.

During the 1820s new states entered the union, voting laws were relaxed, and several states passed legislation that provided for the direct election of presidential electors by voters (electors had previously been appointed by state legislatures). These changes split the Democratic-Republicans into factions, each of which nominated its own candidate in the presidential election of 1824..... Andrew Jackson won the most popular and electoral votes, but no candidate received the necessary majority in the electoral college. When the election went to the House of Representatives Clay—who had finished fourth and was thus eliminated from consideration—threw his support to Adams, who won the House vote and subsequently appointed Clay secretary of state. Jackson, whose strength lay in the South and West, referred to his followers simply as Democrats .Jackson defeated Adams in the 1828 presidential election.

Well no wonder this party sucks fer gods sake. I went back further to the beginnings of the early American political factions and partisan parties. I won't go into the Founder's factional brouhahas but I did run into an interesting tidbit that pertains to my topic... 'Federalist No. 10'. It is an essay written by James Madison for The Federalist.

Federalist No. 10 continues the discussion of the question broached in Hamilton's Federalist No. 9. Hamilton there addressed the destructive role of a faction in breaking apart the republic. The question Madison answers, then, is how to eliminate the negative effects of faction. He defines a faction as "a number of citizens, whether amounting to a minority or majority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community". He identifies the most serious source of faction to be the diversity of opinion in political life which leads to dispute over fundamental issues such as what regime or religion should be preferred.

However, he thinks that "the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society". He saw direct democracy as a danger to individual rights and advocated a representative democracy in order to protect what he viewed as individual liberty from majority rule, or from the effects of such inequality within society. He says, "... a pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischief's of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; and there is nothing to check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker party or an obnoxious individual.

So there you have it my musings on the sorry state of partisan politics at a time when it looks like were going to be treated to another Corrupt Bargain like the one that decided the election of 1824 and led to the formation of the Democratic party in 1828.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupt_Bargain

The "corrupt bargain" that placed Adams in the White House and Clay in the State Department launched a four-year campaign of revenge by the friends of Andrew Jackson. Claiming the people had been cheated of their choice, Jacksonians attacked the Adams administration at every turn as illegitimate and tainted by aristocracy and corruption.

Anybody but Old Hickory for Pres. with his crime against humanity the Trail of Tears and his expansionist war.

If your memory serves you well

And I just said good luck....