Speaking to the Democratic National Committee, which met to select its new leadership this weekend, the outgoing chair, Jaime Harrison, attempted to explain a point about its rules concerning gender balance for its vice-chair race. “The rules specify that when we have a gender-nonbinary candidate or officer, the nonbinary individual is counted as neither male nor female, and the remaining six officers must be gender balanced,” Harrison announced.

As the explanation became increasingly intricate, Harrison’s elucidation grew more labored. “To ensure our process accounts for male, female, and nonbinary candidates, we conferred with our [Rules and Bylaws Committee] co-chair, our LGBT Caucus co-chair, and others to ensure that the process is inclusive and meets the gender-balance requirements in our rules,” he added. “To do this, our process will be slightly different than the one outlined to you earlier this week, but I hope you will see that in practice, it is simple and transparent.”

The Democratic Party, at least in theory, is an organization dedicated to winning political power through elected office, though this might seem hard to believe on the evidence provided by its official proceedings. The DNC’s meetings included a land acknowledgment, multiple shrieking interruptions by angry protesters, and a general affirmation that its strategy had been sound, except perhaps insufficiently committed to legalistic race and gender essentialism.

The good news about the DNC, for those who prefer that the country have a politically viable alternative to the authoritarian personality cult currently running it, is that the official Democratic Party has little power. The DNC does not set the party’s message, nor will it determine its next presidential candidate.

The bad news is that the official party’s influence is so meager, in part because the party has largely ceded it to a collection of progressive activist groups. These groups, funded by liberal donors, seldom have a broad base of support among the voting public but have managed to amass enormous influence over the party. They’ve done so by monopolizing the brand value of various causes. Climate groups, for instance, define what good climate policy means, and then they judge candidates based on how well they affirm those positions. The same holds true for abortion, racial justice, and other issues that many Democrats deem important. The groups are particularly effective at spreading their ideas through the media, especially (but not exclusively) through the work of progressive-leaning journalists, who lean on both the expertise that groups provide and their ability to drive news (by, say, scolding Democratic candidates who fall short of their standards of ideological purity).

The 2020 Democratic primary represented the apogee, to that point, of the groups’ influence. The gigantic field of candidates slogged through a series of debates and interviews in which journalists asked if they would affirm various positions demanded by the groups. That is how large chunks of the field wound up endorsing decriminalization of the border, reparations, and other causes that are hardly consensus positions within the Democratic Party, let alone the broader electorate. It is also how Kamala Harris came out for providing free gender-reassignment surgery to prisoners and migrant detainees, which became the basis of the Trump campaign’s most effective ad against her.

The ongoing influence of the groups can be seen in a new New York Times poll. Asked to list their top priorities, respondents cited, in order, the economy, health care, immigration, taxes, and crime. Asked what they believed Democrats’ priorities were, they cited abortion, LGBTQ policy, climate change, the state of democracy, and health care. That perception of the party’s priorities may not be an accurate description of the views of its elected officials. But it is absolutely an accurate description of the priorities of progressive activist groups.

The poll is a testament to how well the groups have done their job. They have set out to raise public awareness of a series of issues their donors care about, and to commit the party to prioritizing them, and they have done so. Democrats in public office may be mostly engaged in fighting about the economy, health care, and other issues, but they lack the communications apparatus controlled by the groups, which have blotted out their poll-tested messages in favor of donor-approved ones.

Over the past year or so, and especially since Harris’s defeat, some centrist commentators have begun to question the groups’ influence. But the DNC meetings offered no evidence that their thinking has gone out of style.

If Democrats learned from Harris’s campaign that they should try to stop holding events that are easily repurposed as viral Republican attack ads, they showed no sign of it over the weekend. When activists repeatedly interrupted speakers, they were met supportively. “Rather than rebuff the interruptions,” observed the Wall Street Journal reporter Molly Ball, “those onstage largely celebrated them, straining to assure the activists they were actually on the same side and eagerly giving them the platform they broke the rules to demand.”

Neither Harrison nor his successor, Ken Martin, has questioned Joe Biden’s decision to run for a second term, nor any of the messaging or policy that contributed to his dismal approval ratings. When MSNBC’s Jonathan Capehart asked one panel of candidates if they believed racism and misogyny contributed to Harris’s defeat, every panelist agreed. “That’s good, you all pass,” he said. (Note that this diagnosis of the election result has no actionable takeaway other than that perhaps the party should refrain from nominating a woman or person of color.)

The most sadly revealing outcome of the meeting may be the elevation of David Hogg as vice chair. Hogg, a 24-year-old activist, rose to prominence as a survivor of the Parkland, Florida, Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting, and then quickly assimilated the full range of progressive stances—defund ICE, abolish the police, etc.—into his heavily online persona. And despite the horrific experience he endured, he does not seem to be notably wise beyond his years. After the far-right activist and pillow peddler Mike Lindell gained prominence as an election denier, I joked online that progressives needed their own pillow company. (The joke, of course, is that there is obviously no need for your pillow company to endorse your political views.) The next month, Hogg went ahead and turned this joke into reality, founding Good Pillow before resigning a few months later.

Hogg’s takeaway from the 2024 presidential race is that Democrats lost because they failed to rally the youth vote with a rousing message on guns, climate, and other issues favored by progressive activists. Polling, in fact, showed that young voters had similar issue priorities as older voters, but Hogg’s elevation was a tribute to the wish masquerading as calculation that Democrats can gain vote share without compromising with the electorate.

Some Democrats observed the events of the weekend with wry fatalism. At one point, a protester in a Sunrise Movement T-shirt interrupted by shouting, “I am terrified!”

She was not alone.

Climate change could wipe out a whopping $1.47 trillion in real estate value over the next 30 years and fundamentally transform the housing market, according to a new report.

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Scientists say the fires that engulfed Los Angeles were made 35% more likely due to climate warming.

When David Lynch died last week, it was almost hard to know whom exactly to mourn. He was a Renaissance man: musician, painter, meditation instructor, YouTube personality. Most, of course, mourn him as a filmmaker, the medium in which he left his most indelible mark. But I mourn him as a neighbor.

I grew up down the street from David. Three doors down, to be precise. My parents owned a big blue wooden house in the Hollywood Hills, a stark contrast to David’s pink, brutalist box just up the lane. The neighborhood offered me a relatively normal childhood. There were kids to play with right around the corner. I learned to ride my bike in the street; I trick-or-treated. But I was also raised in a place organized by celebrity: by palatial homes, by immense creative success, by privacy as a hallowed virtue. After two decades in the big blue house, there were still neighbors within eyesight of my bedroom window whom I’d never met.

David wasn’t one of them. Though he ranked among the bigger names on the block, and his hermitry was legendary, he let us in. Our lives overlapped a good bit: His son Riley was in my sister Anna’s elementary-school class (they were good friends), his granddaughter Syd in mine (sworn nemeses, though we grew out of it). We went to David’s for the occasional pool party, where we kids were warned to steer clear of his workshop: the so-called Gray House, where the mad scientist conducted his experiments. He introduced my parents to transcendental meditation, a practice they maintain to this day. We attended his Christmas parties annually; he came to ours a grand total of once (in his defense, we required caroling). I knew David like I knew others in L.A.’s upper crust, as separate from his work—though, granted, I’m unsure how you introduce a child to his résumé in good conscience. To the extent that I knew him, I knew him as a neighbor.

It being Los Angeles, I mostly knew him in the car. David drove me to school a handful of times, along with Riley and Anna. Though he was more dad than director to us, David did carry a certain air—he was a tallish guy with a weird voice and weird hair and a weird house, and we were certainly quieter when he was on carpool duty. He once commented as much, pulling up to school after we had spent the ride in a cramped, adolescent silence: “You kids are so quiet, I can barely think.” For all his idiosyncrasy behind the camera, David could be disarmingly plain in conversation. Another morning, he quizzed us on the rules of the road with utter sincerity: “So … if I’m putting on my right turn signal … which way do you think I’m turning?” (Anna, in perfect deadpan: “Right.”)

Once, David appeared at my family’s front door after hours, excited to share a new toy: a Scion xB, a truly hideous vehicle of which he was particularly, oddly proud. He whisked me and my parents through the neighborhood, showing off the wheeled toaster oven as though it was a Model T. Every time we hit a dead end—and there were many in our neighborhood—David would throw the thing into reverse and exclaim with delight: “Scion backing up! Scion backing up!”

As the years passed and we children learned to drive ourselves, I saw less of my neighborhood and far, far less of David. Only after leaving his orbit did I get to know his work. I didn’t become a die-hard fan, but certain creations seized my heart with a pitbull’s grip. I’ll never forget my petrifying first viewing of Mulholland Drive, during which, in a truly Lynchian turn, my friend’s little brother sleepwalked into the room and started speaking to me. My dad, also a filmmaker, was thrilled to screen Eraserhead for me one night, cackling through the baby scenes.

And then there was Twin Peaks. During my last few months living at home, my whole family gathered weekly for a profoundly un-family-friendly viewing of the third season revival, dubbed The Return. I was so infuriated after the final episode that I stalked up the hill in the dead of night and urinated on David’s retaining wall. Though I have warmed to it since, at the time I raged that The Return often felt more like a raised middle finger than a story. But part of my reaction may have also been a childish denial of the point David delivered so effectively in that finale, as Dale Cooper knocks on the door of what he’s sure must be the Palmer residence: Try though you might, you can’t go home again.

[Read: How Twin Peaks invented modern television]

A few years ago, my parents sold the big blue house. They had their reasons: Without kids to fill it, the space was too big; after 30 years in Los Angeles, they wanted to finally live by the beach. But beneath this was a much more practical motivation. Climate change had become undeniable, and they couldn’t shake visions of our neighborhood in flames.

It was a prescient move. Mulholland Drive—the actual street—abuts the back of David’s property and threads through the hills that bisect Los Angeles. It snakes past the entrance to Runyon Canyon, which recently caught fire about a mile away from my old house and David’s. The blaze was contained relatively quickly, thanks in part to the oasis of the Hollywood Reservoir. David evacuated, though neither his house nor the big blue one burned. Not this time, anyway.

Months before the rest of the city sealed its windows and fought to catch its breath, David was doing the same. Last year, he publicly disclosed his emphysema diagnosis. I had hoped to interview him: I reached out to Riley, asking whether David might be up for a chat on the record, neighbor to neighbor. It wasn’t to be. David’s weakened lungs made even crossing the room exhausting and COVID a grave risk, further isolating him from the outside world. I can’t remember the last time I saw David—it would have been many years ago now—but before my parents sold their place, I would visit home and picture him above me somewhere on that dark hill, shuffling through the Gray House, still tinkering.

I have always struggled with Los Angeles. Every time I go back, I confront a cocktail of familiar feelings: nostalgia, frustration at the city’s bad reputation, a sense that Hollywood’s long-dangled, covetous promise of “making it” is alive and well in me. In a lifelong attempt to make peace with one’s home, who better to turn to than a neighbor? Perhaps more than any other director, David rendered Los Angeles fairly: the glittering sprawl of the flats and the freeways, the canyons’ serpentine darkness. He understood the city’s hellish side. His films may have never depicted the place in flames, exactly, but more than one framed Hollywood as a surreal and monstrous syndicate.

Yet his love for L.A. still shone through. In Mulholland Drive’s most arresting scene, the protagonists find themselves at an otherworldly club in the middle of the night. As haunting music emanates from behind a red curtain, an emcee emerges and announces that all the sounds are prerecorded; the entire show is an illusion. But then an entrancing singer takes the stage, lip-syncing so convincingly that the audience’s disbelief is suspended all over again. It’s a tribute to my hometown as critical and unsparing as only true love can be. The whole city, this vast, thirsty project sprouting from the desert, is contrived—and no less beautiful for it.

Like all neighborhoods, mine used to be a lot wilder. When David and my parents first bought their property, about a decade apart, there were still vacant lots in the canyon, and the streets were a patchwork of homes and chaparral scrub where deer and coyotes roamed free. (One of my parents’ favorite stories from my childhood, for whatever reason, involves me nearly getting trampled by a wild buck tearing through our yard.) Years later, my dad found himself catching up with David at a graduation party for Riley and Anna’s class. One of the neighborhood’s last wild tracts had just sold, a fact Dad was bemoaning.

David was unsentimental. He was far more impressed with the element of human craftsmanship than conservation, marveling that anything, with enough ingenuity, could be sculpted from the sandstone. “Oh, yeah,” he replied with his signature squawk and an unmistakable pride, “it doesn’t matter how steep it is. They’ll figure out a way to build on it.”

Climate change has extended wildfire seasons in California, turning winter fires into a year-round crisis.

The cruel reality of living through a moment of catastrophic change is that the knowledge of how many other people are also living through it offers no comfort. It is happening to you: Your house is gone. Your father’s paintings are gone. Your hundreds of hours of footage, meant to be your film, gone. Your family’s efforts, across a whole generation, to establish financial stability, literally up in smoke. That this is also happening to other people is awful. As is knowing that it will almost certainly happen again.

Los Angeles is still smoldering. The winds have died down, but the Palisades Fire is just 39 percent contained, and the Eaton Fire is 65 percent. Many residents are under instructions not to drink their tap water, which ash and melted pipes may have contaminated. Tens of thousands of people under evacuation orders are still waiting to return, perhaps to a burned-out lot, or perhaps to a house still standing but coated in the toxic remains of everything around it.

The fires were, at their worst, unfightable. But destruction at this scale was not inevitable. The question now is what measures anyone will take to limit the damage next time.

Because there will be a next fire. The vegetation—fire fuel—will grow back, fire season will keep lengthening into wind season, and the combination of drought and wind will nurse an errant spark. Fire is part of the ecology in California; a century of suppressing it has only set up modern blazes to be more intense.

The way places such as California prepare for these fires has to change, or more neighborhoods will end up in ruins. Insurance is meant to insulate people from bearing the costs of extraordinary events, but those are becoming ordinary enough that private insurers have been leaving California. The state’s FAIR Plan, a pooled insurance plan of last resort, is oversubscribed, and may not be able to cover the claims from these fires alone. If it exercises its power to demand that private insurers help cover the difference, that could send even more fleeing. These are all signs that the state’s magical thinking about fire risk has exhausted itself.

[Read: Are you sure your house is worth that much?]

“California is like a driver that’s had five car accidents,” Michael Wara, a former member of California’s wildfire commission who now heads a climate-and-energy-policy program at Stanford University, told me. The state is at proven risk of catastrophic loss. But because California has spent years trying to keep insurance rates somewhat reasonable, those (still high) rates don’t reflect the real risk homeowners face. This creates a problem further up the insurance food chain: Insurers rely on reinsurers—insurance companies for insurance companies—who, Wara said, “are supposed to lose one in 100 times … They’re not supposed to lose, like, four times out of 10, which is kind of where we’re on track for in California.”

If a few of those companies stop insuring the insurers, there aren’t necessarily others to step in. The state is trying to stave off a reinsurance crisis by allowing insurers to incorporate more risk probability and reinsurance prices into their rates, as of last year. But California could still turn into Florida, where all but the most local insurers are leaving the state, or going belly-up, and insurance in places can cost tens of thousands of dollars a year. Because coverage is generally required for anyone seeking a mortgage, soaring rates in California could drive home values down, threatening yet another crisis, this one in real estate. And if existing homeowners can’t get insurance, they’ll be left bearing the cost of catastrophes all on their own, like many in the burn area around Los Angeles are now.

If nothing changes, more people will get sucked into this doom spiral, because California cannot avoid some level of catastrophe. Wind-driven fires like the ones in L.A. throw embers far ahead of themselves, leading to conflagrations that firefighters can’t stop, and the fastest fires are growing faster now. Transferring those risks to insurance will become less and less affordable as the climate warms and more people live in the zone where cities meet wildlands, because the catastrophic risk to homes is high and getting higher. As Nancy Watkins, an actuary at Milliman who specializes in catastrophic property risk, told me, “That actually is not an insurance problem. It’s a risk problem.”

To bring down risk, she wants to see neighborhoods embark on ambitious missions to “harden” homes and the landscape around them, and then see insurance companies account for those efforts. If each homeowner has removed vegetation from the first five feet around their house, if the neighborhood has kept its roads clear and made firebreaks where fire would be likeliest to enter, a place has much less of a chance of burning down, even in major fires. Plenty of communities, even the most fire-prone ones, still don’t do this. Watkins imagines a future database in which each parcel of land is inspected for fire-readiness, so that each neighborhood can be profiled for fire safety and insurers can price rates accordingly. Creating this system would take major effort, she knows, but it would motivate collective action: If it meant the difference between your whole neighborhood getting insurance and being uninsured, you would probably clean up your yard and screen your vents.

Watkins herself lives in the Moraga-Orinda Fire District, a highly flammable area outside San Francisco, which Wara’s research has identified as one of the top three places where the worst overnight losses could occur, from an insurance perspective. (Another was Pacific Palisades.) She was one of many in her area who got a nonrenewal notice from her insurer last year. Now she’s making her plot as fire-proof as possible, in hopes of coaxing an insurer back. It’s like staging a property for sale, she said: “We’re staging our home for insurability right now.” She cut down a 10-year-old manzanita tree and pulled out her mint garden, but so far she’s kept the Japanese maple that came with the house and turns a brilliant red in the fall. Once she has fire-proofed the rest of the property, she plans to invite a fire-chief friend over for dinner and ask, How bad is the maple? “And then do what they say,” she told me.

But unless her neighbors make similar efforts, Watkins’s risk will still be elevated. And taking these measures can be politically unpopular. Dave Winnacker, who was the fire chief of the Moraga-Orinda Fire District until his retirement last month, told me about trying to pass an ordinance that would require homeowners to keep a five-foot perimeter around their house free of flammable material; the public comments were overwhelmingly in opposition, even though these borders are proved to cut a house’s risk of burning down, he said. Residents called it a draconian overreach that would make their home unsightly and bring down property values. He chose that moment to retire. He didn’t want to be held accountable for their failure to act the next time fire arrived.

When communities do act, it can save them. Crystal Kolden, a pyrogeographer at UC Merced, studied what happened to Montecito, California—the town of Harry and Meghan, and Oprah—after it decided in the 1990s to take fire prevention seriously. From 1999 to 2017, the town spent $1.6 million total clearing brush, maintaining evacuation paths, building fuelbreaks, and working with homeowners to make sure they’d cleared vegetation around their houses. When the Thomas Fire came through in 2017—a worst-case-scenario fire for the region, with wind speeds around 75 miles an hour—Montecito could have lost 450 to 500 homes, Kolden’s research showed. Instead it lost just seven. Yards in Montecito do look a little different from others in California. But “there’s a lot of really gorgeous landscaping that does not burn,” Kolden told me. Succulents and other fire-resistant plants—think giant agaves—can be close to houses; rock gardens can be beautiful. Palm trees are fine if they’re well-manicured enough that they wouldn’t throw off flaming fronds, as some in L.A. did this week.

For a wealthy community such as Montecito, less than $2 million across almost 20 years is by no means prohibitively expensive. And according to Wara’s research, the state could help fund projects like these at relatively low cost. By spending about $3 billion a year—less than Cal Fire’s total fire-suppression budget in 2020, by his calculation—the state could harden about 100,000 homes a year, starting in the most fire-prone areas, and build fuelbreaks in every highly threatened community. That would also cover preventive burns on every acre that needs them, to prevent larger fires later.

Of course, landscaping and building better-sealed homes won’t change the fact that the biggest California fires are getting more intense. Climate change is creating more suitable conditions for the worst conflagrations to arise, and they will, again and again, with greater frequency now. Slowing that trajectory is a matter of global action. But yet here Angelenos are, living at the scale of their homes, their parcels of the Earth. Fires in California are like hurricanes in Florida. They’re going to happen, and people will live in their path. Stopping them from happening is impossible. But minimizing the damage they wreak is not.

Climate scientist say warming temperatures and droughts are making wildfires more frequent and intense.

On The Stream: We hear from young activists on their journey to educate and help tackle climate change.