There's a certain irony to a democratic party that's not able to give people the candidates they want.

Reading the articles makes the whole party sounds like some MLM scheme. You have to pay to get in, raise X dollars every quarter to stay in, and get out there and lean on your network if you want any kind of leg up.

But I feel like it makes sense that it would be that way, I think it's a symptom of how we view money. I think a lot of people see it as a morally negative commodity - not so much that having a lot of money makes you bad, but more that if you're good you don't need money.

My wife is a grant writer and there are so many grant organizations that say their grants can't be used for salaries - as though accounting software and paint brushes are what's keeping at risk kids from falling into destructive patterns. But there's this societal trope that goodness is it's own reward and that the people who help don't need to be compensated for it.

I think that gets mirrored in our political system. When we want something good, we have the belief that the goodness of that thing is enough - that it has tangible value. The people who don't believe that, the ones who believe dollars have tangible value, are the ones who are right and the ones who get into the positions as gatekeepers.

I'm not saying that there's not value in being good, I'm saying that good is not the antithesis of money (not in this society anyway) and if we want to see beneficial change, we have to change our relationship to money.