i became an anarchist while working for the nevada state democratic party

There are three places in Las Vegas I truly liked: two of them were bars, and the third was Writer’s Block, a wonderful bookstore shaped like a literal block. It was here, a couple days into a job with the Nevada State Democratic Party, that I picked up Chomsky’s “On Anarchism” to get an introduction to the ideology.

I start with this because I don’t want to mislead you. If I was a pure propagandist, I would say that this experience of working for the state Dems made me into an anarchist, when the truth is that I was thinking about it almost from the very start. Becoming an anarchist, however, helped me interpret what I was experiencing while I had the job.

I had worked in electoral politics before: fresh out of high school, age 18, I got a job on the Obama campaign, mostly because I wasn’t finding other jobs, and showing up to the Obama office to volunteer seemed a better use of time than trying in vain to get a job at Best Buy. So, I wasn’t a complete novice… but in 2008, I was mostly working with the IT department. Organizing was all new to me.

Nevada’s caucus in 2016 went poorly. More accurately, the state convention went poorly, which you can go down a whole rabbit hole reading about, if you want. What’s important to establish is that the Hillary and Bernie sides absolutely hated each other. The Hillary side thought the Bernie Bros were violent, rampaging sexists who had threatened to kill the state party chairwoman; the Bernie side thought the whole process had been rigged against them in 2016. Because of all that, the most important thing was for 2020’s caucus to go smoothly: no one threatening to throw any chairs (if you mention “chair throwing” to anyone involved with Nevada electoral politics, you will get a long explanation of how this did or did not really happen), no one accusing anyone of fraud, just a simple, transparent process with a clear winner.

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