TRUE DEMOCRACY RIDICULED—Rest assured, the workings of democracy can ensure that, if victorious, the Democratic Party makes good on its campaign promises of real change. But rest assured also that hostility to democracy is quite pronounced among both Washington's bipartisan media outlets and the political elite.

In the wake of Ned Lamont's victory in Connecticut, and Joe Lieberman's decision not to quit the race, the New York Times columnist David Brooks—the D.C. Democrats' favorite Republican—applauded Lieberman for "explain[ing] why polarized primary voters shouldn't be allowed to define the choices in American politics." Yes, that's right—a columnist for America's paper of record cheered the idea of not allowing American voters to decide political issues.

A few weeks later, Peter Beinart penned an article in the New Republic entitled "The Ned Scare" (so much for subtlety when it comes to red-baiting). The piece celebrated a Lieberman ally, the corporate-funded Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), as "an organization of politicians that believes the less beholden politicians are to grassroots activists, the better they will represent voters as a whole."

Beinart, of course, has become a walking contradiction. He spent the months before the Iraq War berating Democrats for not supporting the invasion; then rescinded his support after the war went bad; then published a book, this year, attacking Democrats for not being more pro-war. Over the course of it, he has been one of the leading voices justifying the Iraq War, on the grounds that it would create a more democratic Middle East. Yet here he was after the Connecticut primary cheering the DLC's anti-democratic view that the less beholden our representatives are to politically engaged voters, the better off America will be.

Nonetheless, his characterization of the DLC is accurate. It was the DLC's president, Al From, who in 2001 said that his goal was to give Democrats "a game plan to try to contain the populism." Populism, you may recall, is defined as "supporting the rights and powers of the common people in their struggle with the privileged elite." Al From has made that vision a reality. The DLC—which has been funded by the likes of Chevron, Enron, Merck and Philip Morris—has, until recently, been extremely effective at pressuring Democrats to ignore the will of the public and capitulate to big business's demands. The DLC has also made a public spectacle of itself by berating Democratic candidates who actually stand up for ordinary people.

PUTTING THE "MOCK" IN DEMOCRACY—To be sure, the DLC never openly admits its objectives, or even its funding sources. Instead, it bills itself as quasi grassroots, holding so-called "national conversations" in an effort to create the impression that its corporate-written agenda has some semblance of public support.

Yet the media coverage of its most recent such "conversation," in Denver this past July, tells the real story. The New York Sun noted that the meeting focused on pondering "how to counter the netroots"—i.e., how to counter the millions of grassroots Democratic Party voters who use the Internet to advocate for a more democratic political system. Perhaps most telling of all was the Rocky Mountain News's note that the DLC's supposed "national conversation" at the Hyatt Regency Hotel was, in fact, "not open to the public."

In an August Rolling Stone column, reporter Matt Taibbi recounted his interview with one DLC leader, who called anti-war activists "narrow dogmatists." Taibbi pointed out that recent Gallup polls have shown that fully 91 percent of Democrats support a withdrawal from Iraq, and he asked the DLC leader to explain this contradiction. "So these hundreds of thousands of Democrats who are against the war are narrow dogmatists?" Taibbi asked. "We have thirty corporate-funded spokesmen telling hundreds of thousands of actual voters that they're narrow dogmatists?"

As Taibbi wrote in a follow-up article, "There is a schism within the party, one that pits 'party insiders' steeped in the inside-baseball muck of Washington money culture against . . . well, against us, the actual voters."

It is this schism between Democratic Party insiders and small-d democrats that the public is told to stop talking about, out of respect for the bigger goal of winning back Congress. Yet, it is this very schism that makes all the difference between whether a Democratic Congress means a truly democratic Congress, and thus real change for America, or whether it merely means fancier offices for a different set of politicians on Capitol Hill.