Lawrence Lessig is singing the blues of the current state of the Democratic Party:

I’m running for President. Or trying. After raising $1 million in less than 30 days, I entered the primary on September 9 as the Democrat’s only non-politician. My platform is simple: end the corrupting influence of money in Washington, so we might finally have, as Buddy Roemer would put it, a Congress free to lead.

But that message is being stifled with the tacit approval of the Democratic Party leadership, who are deploying the oldest method available for marginalizing campaigns they don’t like: keeping me out of the Democratic presidential debates.

Here’s how you make the debates: After one declares, a candidate is formally welcomed into the race by the Democratic National Committee. Polling firms, taking a cue from the DNC, include that candidate on their questionnaires. Candidates that poll at 1 percent nationally in at least three separate polls earn an invitation. Simple enough.

That’s how the process typically works for other candidacies—but not for mine. The DNC still has not formally welcomed me into the race—despite my raising money at a faster pace than more than half the pack, and being in the race nearly a full month. Polls, in turn, have taken the hint, only including me sporadically on questionnaires: of the last 10 major polls, only three mentioned my candidacy. One poll recently put me at 1 percent (for comparison, candidates O’Malley, Webb and Chafee, who will each get a podium at the debates, are all currently polling at 0.7 percent or less, according to Real Clear Politcs). Were I actually included on every poll, I would easily make the debates.

The Democratic Party could fix this by welcoming me into the race. Yet when I tried to talk about this with the chair of the Democratic Party, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, she scheduled a call, but then cancelled it. So far she hasn’t had the time to schedule another. I’ve had similar experiences at the state level, where the same game is played: The chair of the New Hampshire Democrats invited me to speak at their convention. I was given 5 minutes. Hillary Clinton took an hour.

These signals from the party affect the media, too. While news shows have been busy limning the depths of Donald Trump’s brain, there hasn’t been time to consider a Democratic candidate saying something that no other Democrat is saying—especially if the party itself doesn’t consider the candidate a real candidate. And while the Atlantic listed me as a candidate on their website from day one, it took some lobbying to get the New York Times to do the same. Neither fish nor fowl, and not insanely rich, no one quite knows where to place a candidate like me.

Moe Lane weighs in:

…..the DNC doesn’t want to have him on the debate stage. In fact, the DNC doesn’t want there to be an actual debate at all. They want a quiet, boring, and above all cheap primary season, so as to maximize the amount of time Hillary Clinton spends in cryostasis. The DNC cannot control the situation completely, but they can by God control the presence of Lawrence Lessig, so they shall.

On the other hand; this is how the Democratic party operates. This is always how the Democrat party has operated. The Democratic party leadership has always been adamantly against allowing any kind of genuinely populist – even the twisted, sad, bitter examples of it that manage to half-grow on the Left – sentiment to drive policy. Lessig is supposedly an educated man; surely he understands that the party of Wilson and FDR would think of him and his as useful idiots who look at their best when a firm boot is placed upon their necks.

This right here above that I quoted, is the exact reason why I stopped voting for the Democratic Party. They do not want people to have a choice, they did not want people to have a choice in 2008, and now they do not want a choice in 2016. It has been non-stop Hillary Clinton. Well, some of us do not want another Clinton in the White House, at all. You have to remember, I am 43 years old, I am old enough to remember the Clinton White House; I remember the scandals, I remember Waco, I remember Monica, I remember all of that. Because of that, I do not want another Clinton in the White House at all.

The Democrats are going to get what they want and they do not give a flip as to how they get it or who they hurt or kill to get it done. That, my friends, is fascism; that my friends is, as Moe Lane called it, “boot to the neck” thuggery. I give the Republicans credit, at least they have a wide selection of people in the primary. With the Democrats, it’s Hillary or third party. That’s not the American way at all.

Of course, when you operate a political party that is direction opposition to the values that America was founded upon, you should expect such things. America was not founded as a Democracy, America was founded as a Constitutional Republic. It is such a pity that many well-meaning Americans have been duped into the lies that the Democratic Party feeds them.

Others:  Liberal Values, Hit & Run