After the savage shellacking the Democrats recieved in this year’s election, establishment members of the party are trying their hardest to keep their jobs. Donna Brazile, the interim head of the Democratic National Committee, who succeeded the embattled Debbie Wasserman Schultz, recently gave a rousing speech to the committee calling for unity. Brazile, of course, was fired from CNN after it was revealed that she sent Hillary Clinton's campaign debate questions ahead of the network’s televised town hall. As if losing the election and her job weren’t enough, Brazile was heckled midway through her speech by some kid named Zach. “You backed a flawed candidate, and your friend [Schultz] plotted through this to support your own gain and yourself,” Zach said.

It is worth noting, of course, that Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by a pretty significant margin. The Democrats, however, have seen a dramatic decline in governorships around the country as well as in the Senate and the House, pointing to broader dysfunction in the party.

The turmoil inside the DNC could in the end be a positive. If the leading forces in the party finally get their heads out of the dark place they’re in, they might see that there’s a pretty good candidate for DNC chair right in front of them. Keith Ellison, a congressman from Minnesota, who is black and Muslim, emerged as the clear favorite following Hillary Clinton's election defeat. Ellison, you might remember, was the only major Democrat to think Donald Trump had a chance at winning the presidency; you can watch this very ominous clip of him being laughed at by a panel of white people for the suggestion.

After receiving strong endorsements from both Chuck Schumer and Bernie Sanders — two divergent poles of the Democratic Party — Ellison was all but certain to clinch the nomination for chair of the DNC, potentially ushering in a much-needed overhaul of the Democratic party machine.

Democrats don’t like to do things the easy way, though. After all, this is the party that ignored the fact that their candidate lost Michigan and Pennsylvania to a socialist and thought Lena Dunham was an effective surrogate. New York Times Washington editor Jonathan Weisman thinks nominating Ellison is foolish, considering the need to capitulate to the racist wing of the Republican Party as the Times has made it its mission to do. The Washington Post, which made it a point to discredit any and all critiques of Hillary Clinton in the primaries, thinks Ellison’s baggage — statements about Republican President George Bush made in the early 2000s — are a significant hurdle.

The most absurd of the Democratic arguments against Ellison is that articles he wrote in law school could potentialy disqualify him from the race.

In the late 1980s and 1990s, as a law student at the University of Minnesota, Ellison wrote a series of columns praising Louis Farrakhan, the leader of the controversial Nation of Islam (not associated with Islam), who frequently engaged with anti-Semitic ideology. In the 1990s Farrakhan was blocked from recieving a $1billion gift from none other than Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya. For his part, Ellison's praise of Farrakhan was focused on his commitment to advancing issues for African-Americans. Farrakhan was one of the few speaking publicly on the plight of black Americans at the time, whose communities, it should be noted, were absolutely decimated thanks to policies from Ronald Reagan and, later, Bill Clinton.

So, because Keith Ellison at one point (26 years ago!) wrote nice things about someone who was associated with people who were critical of Israel, it is impossible today for him to run the Democratic Party.

Keith Ellison is a perfectly fine candidate for DNC chair. A good one, even. He's right for the job because he has his head in a much brighter place than most Democrats, but also because he understands what mainstream members of the party, still humming their favorite lines from Hamilton, don’t: A Democratic Party that leaves American workers behind will remain an absolutely hopeless force against the populist, racist movement spreading across the country.