Revolt Against Plutocracy: Grassroots Revolution Isn’t Just BS [View all]

http://www.nationofchange.org/2015/06/24/revolt-against-plutocracy-grassroots-revolution-isnt-just-bs/

You’ve probably heard the familiar revolutionary slogan “To make an omelet, you’ve got to break some eggs.” In the vivid contrast between “breaking eggs” and “walking on eggs”—the latter expression implying a tortuous, torturous effort to avoid cracking the shells one is forced to tiptoe among—we glimpse the most compelling reason Sanders’ called-for revolution can’t be the same thing as his campaign.

In a political system that’s now a hollow shell of representative government, our eggshell metaphor couldn’t be better chosen. Where virtually the sole real purpose of government is to shove the will of plutocrats—whether Wall Street, fossil fuel, Big Ag, Big Pharma, or military-industrial-surveillance complex plutocrats—down the sane majority’s throats (to the planet-threatening detriment of the common good), the chief purpose of most political campaigns is to maintain the trompe-l’oeil solid appearance of representation’s hollow shell. In other words, most campaigns amount to propaganda touting the lie that our existing political system is still serving us. It’s clearly not—to the extent that even such a sold-out tool as today’s Democratic Party must allow more radical voices bent on serving the common good, like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, within its ranks to maintain the faintest illusion of legitimacy.

Given the extreme betrayals of faux-progressive presidents like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, political leftists have earned an incontestable right to distrust: above all, to distrust of soaring campaign rhetoric high on promise and devoid of detail. Considering the global catastrophe for economy, democracy, and peace that was George W. Bush’s presidency, Obama’s betrayal of urgently needed progressive reform is especially unfortunate. But amidst its well-earned distrust, the left makes a serious mistake by tarring the likes of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren with the same incriminating brush as Obama and the Clintons, punishing them for their mere association with Democrats. As regards the treachery of Democrats’ party leadership and its favored minions like Clinton, the left is incontestably right, as the analysis of honest veteran operative Bill Curry or a little research into the sleazy trickery of its corporatist leadership should make clear.