You cannot take over the Democratic Party. It will just change its own rules before you get the chance. The people running it are all feeding from the same donor trough, either as politicians or consultants. You think they will let you just take the trough away? Friend they make the party rules! They will just change them! They already did this against Bernie, an imperialist socdem, someone who isn’t even a real threat to capital (just the insurance industry) and they thwarted that even when it had momentum and kids allowed themselves hope for healthcare without poverty. This is the basic nature of capitalist parties: they are beholden to capital, not the people, and certainly not you or I.

By the time the Democratic Partu is “taken over” by anything, it will be because it has found a way to make capital happy by adopting a policy that costs them nothing. Which means we win nothing of serious value and the spiral of capitalist degrading conditions continues.

In the meantime, what role do these reformers actually serve? If they can’t change what needs yo change, what other effects do they have?

Well, they mostly just convince people to have false hope for the party, delaying its need to crash and burn and be replaced, ideally with something more effective than a bourgeois electoral party.

Bernie and AOC are sheepdogs for the Dems. They are all-in on the party. When people become disillusioned with Dems, they pop in to spread false hope and convince people to come back and believe in the Dems.

It is true that the welfare state is popular and thar is basically what they are selling. The public wants healthcare, not the cruelty and expense of the capitalist extraction insurance industry. So Medicare for All sounds great in comparison. It’s very popular when actually explained to people.

But it will never become policy without turmoil. The health insurance industry is a huge leech excreting profits for the owner class. Dems want to dangle it in front of voters but will never suppory it when in power, they will enginerr a Lieberman or parliamentarian because the party is completely beholden to capital, including insurance capital.

I’m sure you agree with a lot of what I have said. I just want to emphasize that Bernie and AOC are not really outsiders, they are ineffectual refornists whose only current function - one that they embrace - is to keep people that hate the crimes of the Democratic Party, up to and including genocide, to keep voting for them.

“Both sides bad” is why we have Trump.

You have Trump because you have capitalism and the reactionary political class serves a purpose in it. Liberalism tells you to only think of politics in a vacuum: whatever the last election was and what the next election is. In this vacuum they limit the world of politics down to what the two capitalist parties promise for capital, which varies and triangulates over time. The GOP was originally a party of free states and slavery abolition and the Democrats slavers and Southern white racists. Look at how they shift over time, both parties existing now for over 120 years. If you only ever look at the previous and next 4 years of what the capitalist political duopoly gives you, you will never understand the currents or why your “good guys” are increasingly xenophobic and transphobic or how political choices are actually made, because it is not just every four years at a ballot box proxied through some weirdos in the electoral college.

Anyways, both sides are bad. Have you already forgotten Biden’s genocide in Gaza? Dems’ “tough on the border” pivot? Breaking the rail strike? Being competent stewards of imperialism? I think liberals like to forget Blue Crimes, they are basically told to do so by mass media and it doesn’t comport with parasocially liking the sunglasses ice cream guy if you acknowledge he’s a genocidal racist. It isn’t really your fault to be in that bubble, but it is on you if you don’t seriously listen to others taking the time to explain its problems.

Democrats took America from gays are illegal, to full gay rights with marriage.

Absolutely wrong. Gay rights were popularized by left struggle, not struggle from Dems. Dems were dragged there by younger people that were radicalized by the people actually fighting for gay rights. Pride was a riot. The liberal assent and cooption was lagging, not leading. And in the US, gay marriage at the federal level was created by fiat of unelected lords (the Supreme Court) and not Democratic policy, despite Dems having full control of Congress and the Presidency in the neighboring period. Finally, gay rights are not full. I don’t understand why you think they would be. Gay people still face all kinds of oppressions in the US and the law only rarely protects them.

Environmental laws have been all Democrats.

This is simply factually incorrect. Early “environmental” laws were largely implemented by Republicans, including Teddy Roosevelt, also a racist genocidal war criminal. This was in many ways responding to muckrakers and organized labor who saw the environment, living conditions, and working conditions as inextricable.

Nixon signed the EPA into existence.

If Democrats did nothing, Trump wouldn’t have signed 76 executive orders reversing Biden orders on his very first day.

Democrats don’t do nothing, they just avoid doing the vast majority of things good for humanity in general and even just the US citizen working class. Even when they promise to do so, they have an excuse and whipping boy ready to go. Oh, Ovama and the national platform said single-payer? Sorry there’s Lieberman and we can’t kill the filibuster and oh man no discipline at all. Cancel student debt? Oh sorry there’s a parliamentarian that we can just override and fire and okay we will issue a conspicuously legally weak executive order and then fold at the earliest opportunity.

But Democrats do implement policies, they just do so in the interest of capital. Their platform represents certain formations of capital, the GOP’s some others, and they share many donors. The different formations undo each others’ work when in power. Or at least they don’t flex their muscles until something is intolerable to them.