DK is probably not the best place to post this, but I don't know where else to go. The basic realization is this: it is easier for the average US vote to learn how bring about "regime change" in the country than bring about "regime change" in one of the national parties.
The Democratic Party we have now is, for the most part, a huge disgrace, second only, and not by much, to the Republican Party. It is no wonder that sinking poll numbers for Bush and the Republicans have not translated into improving poll numbers for the Democratics. (True, a recent Time poll says that most American voters are ready to vote for Democrats just to clean up the epic mess that the Republicans have created, but the same Time article reports that "approval for congressional Democrats is no higher (39%) than for Republicans").
And yet, neither I nor anyone else I have asked, have any idea of how to go about taking back the Democratic Party away from the collection of nincompoops and downright traitors who run it now. This shadowy little cabal seems to be far less accountable to the voters than the Bush Administration. As far as I can tell, the Democratic rank and file has absolutely no say in who runs the Democratic Party and how. We live in an informational vacuum on this subject, and this needs to change if we are going to have a Democratic Party that voters actually want to vote for (rather than a party that voters choose as the lesser of two evils). Who holds the levers of power within the Democratic Party? How did they get there, and, more importantly, how can we, the grass roots, kick them out?
I don't believe in 3rd parties, because I think that our winner-takes-all system of elections makes such parties unstable. I.e., in the long run, as long as America has the system of government it has, it will be dominated by two parties for most of the time. A political configuration with more than two competitive parties will always be a transient one.
Therefore, the impulse towards a third party has to be channeled into taking over one of the existing parties. The Democratic Party is ripe for this. It is a deeply dysfunctional organization, packed to the gills with incompetents and probably riddled with spies for the opposition. Regime change long overdue in the Democratic Party. If we could only find out whose heads to chop...