What struck me hearing this while driving was how many political and civic organizations are structurally incapable of creating that cycle. And how much that failure costs them.

A recent Volts podcast episode about why people have stopped trusting democracy-serving institutions made a related argument: rebuilding trust doesn’t come from more information or better messaging. It comes from changing how people think about their identity. And that requires being together, going through things together, what the guest called “sharing pheromones.” Social identity precedes political trust. You cannot shortcut the relational part.

Taken together, these two ideas describe something I’ve been watching happen in slow motion inside the organizations I’ve spent my career in: institutions that can’t create conditions for mattering, and that increasingly struggle to build the kind of trust that only comes from shared experience, are also the institutions most likely to collapse under crisis rather than grow through it. The machinery I wrote about in my first essay is not just structurally broken. It is relationally depleted.

The response to that first essay showed me the shape of the problem in real time.

There were angry, divisive comments — the kind that, a few years ago when I held some of the roles I’ve previously held, could have provoked a genuine PR crisis. There was also the quieter signal: people sharing the piece privately, inside safe circles since they felt they couldn’t comment publicly. That gap — between what people say out loud inside institutions and what they actually think — is itself a symptom. Organizations where people cannot tell the truth about what isn’t working have lost something important, and what they’ve lost usually took years to erode.

I understand some of why this happens. Many modern political and civic organizations are financially fragile, reputation-sensitive, and structurally dependent on maintaining donor confidence and coalition stability. Under those conditions, hard conversations can start to feel threatening rather than generative. People move quickly toward defense, certainty, or blame before fully sitting with difficult questions.

But suppressing truth has compounding costs. Burnout. Resentment. Disconnection. Eventually organizations lose not just strategic clarity but the human trust and emotional resilience necessary to navigate crises well.

When something becomes a crisis — and in this sector, something always becomes a crisis — the most useful first question is not whose fault is this. It is: where are we, actually?

There is an image I keep returning to. You are driving in thick fog, unable to see where you are going. The fog lifts. You are on the wrong side of the road and there is a truck coming. You do not convene a working group to assign blame. You move the car.

Discernment produces action that is natural, quick, and appropriate. But you cannot self-correct until you can see clearly where you are. We spend too much time in political organizations analyzing who caused the problem and not enough time correcting the course. In many cases we cannot correct course even when the fog lifts, because the organizational structure was never designed to move quickly. That is not a messaging problem. That is a machinery problem.

Crisis intervention theory describes crisis not as a fixed state but as a curve. A person or organization enters from relative stability, descends into disequilibrium, and then resolves — upward, downward, or sideways. The resolution is not predetermined.

The window of opportunity sits at the bottom of the curve, the point of maximum instability. Not because the bottom is comfortable, but because it is the moment when old patterns are most disrupted and new ones are most possible.

What most determines if a person or organization ends up in better or worse outcomes is not the severity of the crisis, it is whether they move through it isolated or supported.

Most political and civic organizations are run with almost no margin for human crisis. When a leader loses a parent, receives a diagnosis, or becomes a caregiver, the organization often has no real answer to who covers for them. The honest answer is usually nobody, or everybody absorbs a little more until someone else breaks.

There is rarely a bereavement policy that accounts for the reality of grief, which is not three to five days and then back to normal. There is rarely a succession plan for when a key person goes down. There is rarely a culture that makes it safe to say: I am not okay and I need support.

The result is that people make quiet calculations. They work through grief because there is no alternative. They delay caregiving until they cannot. Or they leave and step out of full-time roles to care for aging parents, partners, children with complex needs, and the sector loses people it cannot easily replace. The people most likely to leave are disproportionately women and disproportionately mid-career or senior. They do not always leave because they want to. They leave because the structure of the work makes staying impossible.

When they go, they take relationships, institutional memory, and hard-won expertise with them. The organization survives. It is not the same.

Many progressive and civic organizations spend years trapped in recurring crisis cycles without ever metabolizing what those cycles are doing to the people inside them. Constant urgency becomes normalized. Exhaustion becomes cultural. Survival becomes strategy. They stay on the curve, never resolving upward, never quite reaching the window.

Organizations that exist to improve human life can end up eroding the wellbeing of the humans trying to sustain them. And when enough of those humans leave or diminish, the mattering cycle breaks entirely. There is no one left who feels valued enough to add value back.

A month ago marked four years since my father died. For the first time since his death, I did not post publicly about it. I spent the day at the zoo with my mom instead.

My father is a large part of why I entered politics. He was a criminal defense attorney and single father navigating major health issues in the early 2000s, before the Affordable Care Act existed. Pre-existing conditions meant he could not access health insurance while accumulating overwhelming medical debt. Watching the healthcare system upend our lives is what first pulled me toward advocacy and electoral politics. His death, four years ago, is what pulled me toward building a coaching practice.

I think a lot of us in this political space have been grieving for longer than we name. Grieving what we thought this profession was. Grieving versions of institutions we believed in. Some of us have been carrying that for close to ten years now.

What I want to say about grief — about that kind of grief, and the more personal kind — is that we do not move on from it so much as move forward with it. And in the process, it can reorganize us.

My father’s death reorganized me. Over time I felt healthier, steadier, more present. Three years without alcohol. A fitness routine I actually keep. Countries I actually visited. A home I actually spend time in. The grief stayed. But it changed what I built around it.

What made the difference between coming out better rather than worse was not something I engineered alone. It was therapy after he died, coaching later, honest friendships, and spaces where I could think carefully about who I wanted to be on the other side of the loss.

People and organizations go through terrible events either isolated or supported, and the outcomes are usually very different. Not because support removes the crisis, but because because going through it with people who will stay and tell you the truth changes what you become on the other side.

The comments on my first essay were full of people describing what it felt like to try to matter inside institutions that couldn’t receive it. That is the underlying story. Not bad messaging. Not bad candidates. People trying to add value in places that had lost the capacity to make them feel valued. The mattering cycle is broken at its source.

Building organizations that can survive crisis, retain their people, and actually improve over time is not just a structural problem, it is a deeply relational one. And the relational work — the trust, the mattering, the shared experience of going through hard things together — cannot be outsourced, automated, or skipped.

We know what helps. We rarely build for it.

Ken’s response reads like the Democratic establishment is still trapped in the post-2016 mindset that the core problem is messaging: better language, better framing, better communication discipline. Amanda’s response swings hard in the opposite direction, arguing the lesson is leadership failure severe enough that Ken should resign. Both diagnoses miss the deeper issue. Rob’s account gets at so many helpful points around Brand but misses core institutional infrastructure flaws that have to be fixed for the Brand work he describes to actually produce results.

The Democratic Party’s problem is not primarily messaging. And it’s not primarily one person; it’s organizational design.

We keep treating every election loss like a communications failure or a leadership failure when the deeper reality is that the Democratic Party apparatus itself no longer functions coherently enough to sustain a strong national brand.

The “party brand” problem still deserves the #1 spot it held a decade ago. But branding isn’t just slogans and ads. A political brand is the external expression of an institution’s internal reality. And right now, the internal reality of the Democratic Party is fragmentation, bureaucracy, process obsession, and organizational incoherence.

I spent 16 years in Democratic politics, from volunteering for Obama in 2008 to serving as a state party executive director and later executive director of a national party-aligned organization that coordinated with 40+ state parties and 500+ local parties in 2024. Somewhere along that journey, I lost about 90% of my clarity around what the Democratic Party actually is, what it means, and what its purpose is supposed to be — and that’s a problem.

Branding a political party that’s trying to speak to more than half of America’s 262 million voting-age adults is obviously difficult. But it requires something the modern party apparatus increasingly lacks: real cultural immersion and sustained contact with “ordinary people” outside political spaces.

Ironically, the old party machine era understood this better than we do now. For all its flaws, politics was embedded in communities, neighborhoods, churches, unions, civic organizations, and daily life.

“The Message” all the Democrats are seeking to align on wasn’t something people primarily experienced through national messaging documents or consultant-tested language. It manifested organically in union halls, parish fish fries, VFWs, rotary clubs, volunteer fire departments, local taverns, and neighborhood associations. The party was less an abstract national identity and more a web of actual human relationships. Politics and social support work wasn’t categorized and organized separately from day-to-day life; it was woven into it.

The old patronage-machine era world had obvious problems: exclusion, corruption, insularity, favoritism. But also it contributed to creating durable social bonds and clear community presence in ways modern political organizations often struggle to replicate.

Today, much of Democratic politics exists inside professionalized systems populated by staff, consultants, donors, advocacy organizations, operatives, and internal governance structures that can become increasingly disconnected from ordinary social life. The result is that the party often talks at communities rather than existing organically within them. I plan to write more about this in the future, but in short — today, so much of the party’s energy is consumed organizing itself internally.

By design, the Democratic Party apparatus spends enormous amounts of time on process: committee meetings (literally - there are tens of thousands of these required to occur across the country every year), delegate selection fights, caucus procedures, bylaws, conventions, compliance systems, internal elections, and intra-party governance rituals that most normal people neither understand nor care about.

And after all that time and money, what do we often have to show for it? A botched caucus. Another procedural controversy. Another internal meltdown.

After 2024, it hit me that I had devoted basically an entire driver’s-license lifetime to Democratic politics because I wanted to help change the world. But too often, what I actually became expert at was building systems to make quarterly meetings run more efficiently so party leaders could spend less time herding committees and more time fundraising. That realization was sobering and led to a career change.

I still talk to party leaders almost every day. Many are retirees. Many are not wealthy. Some spend huge portions of their retirement income driving across rural counties trying to reconnect with “real people” after 2024 while simultaneously dealing with national party dysfunction that makes their volunteer jobs even harder. So yes — I’m glad Ken apologized.

But my real takeaway is this:

The DNC is never going to become the magical central-command brand institution many Democrats want it to be because the organization is structurally designed to prioritize process management over brand building.

And this autopsy itself almost proves the point. It became another broken-process story.

The comparison I keep thinking about is The New York Times. Fifteen years ago, it looked like a declining flagship institution struggling to adapt to a new era. What changed wasn’t just the outward-facing product. The internal organization changed first. Internal operations, team-design, and communications changed. Culture changed. Decision-making changed. The external brand transformation came after the internal transformation. Part of my background is in data and technology and what happened at the NYT was a shift to focusing on product over project.

The Democratic Party has the opposite instinct. We keep trying to fix messaging without fixing the machinery producing the messaging. And from what I’ve seen over nearly two decades, the machinery is not working. We need to be honest that the inside of the party is broken before we can realistically expect the outside brand to improve.

That means modernizing the actual organizational structure itself:

• electronic voting and streamlined governance systems and lasting “products,”

• fewer bureaucratic layers,

• fewer duplicative committee structures,

• better operational tools and support for county parties,

• a slew of boring changes to national, state, and local by-laws and party and campaign governance structures, and even state statutes where it can be done,

• and dramatically more time spent talking to voters instead of talking to ourselves.

Right now, we spend staggering amounts of time and money maintaining a sprawling internal ecosystem of precinct, ward, township, county, district, and state-level party structures that often exhaust the very volunteers trying to keep them alive. That sprawling internal ecosystem is the front door when people want to get involved in the Party.

Meanwhile, thousands of local party organizations are struggling just to find someone under 50 who knows how to manage a spreadsheet or file compliance paperwork.

No one wants to talk seriously about reforming the actual internal operating system of the Democratic Party — the giant alphabet-soup octopus of overlapping committees, entities, and jurisdictions. The processes to operate this octopus vary widely county to county and state to state and require in-depth (boring) knowledge of sprawling rules for re-organization and local elections.

But that’s the work.

Some of these structures made sense when politics was geographically slower, communication was harder, and organizations depended on in-person hierarchy to function. A lot of them no longer fit the modern world.

And every hour spent inside endless committee meetings is an hour not spent building trust, relationships, persuasion, or cultural relevance outside the political bubble.

The party keeps treating branding as a communications problem when it’s increasingly an organizational design problem.

If Democrats want a coherent, trusted, desirable brand again, the first step probably isn’t another messaging memo.

It’s redesigning the institution itself so it can spend less time managing process and more time participating in actual American life — more time in communities than in committee meetings.

I have more thoughts on some small sweet steps to redesign the institution, and some pipe-dream seeming ones, but those are for a later essay!