To paraphrase a real Supreme Court Justice, you can have free and fair elections with one person and one vote, or you can have Democratic Party super duper delegates possessing weighted votes. But you cannot possibly have both.
Of course, Justice Louis Brandeis was a lot more sweeping in his denunciation of oligarchic fascism. Though a permanent part of the American fabric, iron rule by the rich has more or less succeeded in hiding itself when every two and four years, regular people are super-duped into believing that they have an actual say. When Brandeis championed FDR's New Deal in 1933, he bluntly proclaimed: "We must make our choice. We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
In an extraordinary burst of brazenness, the ruling aristocrats of the erstwhile People's Party have revealed in the New York Times that they will override the expected plurality of primary votes for Bernie Sanders, and will anoint their own nominee this July to pretend-challenge Donald Trump. Even if Sanders falls only one vote short of the 1,991 delegates needed to clinch the nomination, he will be soundly defeated on the second ballot of a brokered convention.
The superdelegates as much as admit that would rather see a second term of Donald Trump than acquiesce to stitching up even a few of the gaping holes in the social safety net that they've helped the mean old Republicans to rip to shreds over the last four decades of neoliberal capitalism.
The oligarchs who run the Democratic Party would rather see you die than have Sanders impose even a few minor taxes on their obscene wealth.
Bloomberg surrogate Judy Sheindlin, the highest-paid woman on television, recently spoke on behalf of her entire privileged class when she seethed: "America doesn't need a revolution. It's the most perfect country in the world and those people that are trying to change it don't have a chance because I'll fight them to the death!"
"Those people" are nurses, teachers, and a majority of young Blacks and Latinos.
Sheindlin, star of the long running courtroom TV series, has made a fortune exploiting and berating the mainly poor litigants who appear on her show. They are paid extremely modest appearance fees ranging from $100 to $500 for the privilege of being insulted. For her part, Judge Judy rakes in nearly $1 million per day of filming.
Her popular show is thus a microcosm of extreme wealth disparity and capitalist oppression and the class war, but with just the right liberal sheen to make it acceptable. She always gives credit to contestants who can demonstrate to her satisfaction that they are pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps. But woe betide the single mom on public assistance who dares to claim in Judge Judy's court that she takes care of her children. "You don't support your children. I support your children!" is her common retort. "What an America!"
But try, just for a moment, to empathize with Judge Judy. She is probably more scared than most members of the more discreet oligarchy. Because if Bernie Sanders were elected president with a new progressive congress on his coattails, and the country's poverty rate started going down with enactment of guaranteed health care, a government jobs program, living wage laws, debt forgiveness, and affordable housing stock, then the incidence of poor people resorting to suing other poor people in small claims courts just to survive for another month might also start decreasing. And then Judge Judy's blockbuster ratings might begin to suffer.
Well, not quite. Her reruns, which she personally owns, will air into perpetuity or whenever humanity finally wipes itself out. Meanwhile, as she dished to fellow plutotainer and George Bush BFF Ellen De Generes, she's rebranding herself as "Judy Justice."
As it is, 10 million people tune in every single day to watch Judge Judy bravely wage the class war, Her fans feel better knowing that at least they're not as "dumb and dumber" as the contestants on her show.
Sheindlin has much the same right-wing populist appeal as Donald Trump. But while his shtick is making his fans believe that everybody can get rich by being a jerk, her shtick is that no matter how much of a jerk and a loser you may happen to be, the best therapy in the world is to sit on your couch and identify with a well-educated multimillionaire insult comic with a preturnatural gift for grinding the lesser people into pulp. The fact that a fair proportion of her supporting cast are deadbeat dads, bad girlfriends, drunk apartment-trashing college kids and small time grifters makes you feel better about your own oppression at the hands of the winner-take-all oligarchy. And a lot less guilty about laughing at the expense of your poor-shamed fellow citizens.
Meanwhile, as Sheindlin gushed to the plutocratic ladies of The View, the main qualifications for the presidency are being smart, rich and successful - as opposed to being smart, empathetic and egalitarian.
It is testament to their own pathological selfishness and desperation that plutocrats like Mike Bloomberg and Judge Judy are now personally and directly and very meanly waging the permanent class war as political candidates and surrogates rather than relying on the usual subterfuge of preaching the politics of I feel your pain" and "choice" and "personal responsibility." They're finally telling voters that not only do their votes not count, but that their very lives and livelihoods don't count either.
They're the owners, and you're the commodities and consumers. Casting your lot with a democratic socialist is so way beyond the pale that it makes them blanch.
The liberal aristocracy's unabashed ownership of the "Democratic" Party is the height of irony. The whining of the anti-Bernie plutocrats also proves that although obscene wealth can buy power, it cannot buy self-awareness. Money destroys self-awareness and human empathy when it becomes the whole rationale for the existence of those possessing it.
Why else would party leaders and owners brazenly admit that they are willing to destroy their own organization in order to keep their individual wealth and to keep amassing it even if it ends up killing them along with everybody else on the planet?
Judge Judy, of course, is not the only one suffering from misguided plutocratic angst. There are thousands of them. Former Senator Chris Dodd's own living nightmare is the prospect of a Sanders For President bumper sticker being forcibly affixed to one of his luxury cars. It's almost as terrifying as Chris Matthews' nightmare of Bernie Bros executing him in Central Park.
Dodd, one of the 90-odd antisocial superdelegates interviewed by the New York Times, whined right out loud: "People are worried. How can you spend four or five months hoping you don't have to put a bumper sticker of that guy on your car?"
He can't even utter the name of Bernie Sanders. "Those people" and "that guy" are as far as they can go when telegraphing racism and classism.
The Times did not see fit to mention in its article that fresh off a stint representing the Hollywood film industry, Dodd now spends his valuable time lobbying against Medicare For All and Wall Street casino regulation.
Corporations are people are worried, my friend.
The other irony - besides that of the uber-wealthy naming their private political club "the Democratic Party" - is that slamming the door shut on a Bernie Sanders nomination also opens the door a crack for the rest of us. If the oligarchs are perfectly willing to destroy their party for the sake of their own personal gain, a viable replacement, or true People's Party is there for the organizing.
"Any Blue Will Do" voter-shaming, gaslighting propaganda will not work, even if a cheated Bernie Sanders exhorts his followers to defeat Donald Trump by getting behind Joe Biden or even the consolation prize of a severely compromised Elizabeth Warren. It certainly didn't work in 2016 when the coronation of Hillary Clinton was effectuated a lot more subtly and secretly than the blatant attempted destruction of the Sanders movement
The main thing to remember is that democratic socialism, or social democracy, or socialism will never emerge from electoral politics. And it will never emerge without relentless struggles against those who aim to control us and beat us into submission and even actual death. The powerful forces that aim to destroy Bernie Sanders - and us - have the military, the corporate media propagandists, the police and surveillance states at their exclusive disposal.
Judge Judy is right. It's a fight to the death. And it always has been, through most of American history, from the enslavement of kidnapped Africans to the extermination of Indians, to the endless wars for profit abroad. But now is one of those rare times that the ruling class not only feels threatened, it readily admits that it feels threatened.
And every once in a while, the people do win. The eight-hour day, the abolition of slavery, the end of child labor, the New Deal, the Civil Rights victories of the 1960s, the Great Society - and all were bottom-up victories that came under oligarchic attack from the very moments of their inception.
The oligarchs hate us, of course. But more importantly, they fear us. So we should carpe diem while they're so mindlessly obsessed with carping all the way to the bank. Let's make Chris Dodd's worst nightmare a living reality.
