The very notion of a capitalist democracy is suspect at best. This system will always provide a modicum of democracy for some, generally the wealthiest among us, as long as it’s supported by a species of enslavement reserved for the multitude. But even by its own lights, this late-phase example of Democracy, American-Style is in shambles. The collaboration of both major political parties in accelerating the fall of organized labor as a broad, galvanizing social force represented the unmistakeable beginning of the end. When that moment came after the war, more decades ago than most Americans can remember now, that our institutions elected finally to put the screws to unionization, collective bargaining, and everything else that the ideal of human solidarity had historically accomplished, to bolster our shining capitalist democracy – keeping labor and capital in a marginal, always uneasy alignment so that a propaganda construct known popularly as the American Dream appeared attainable to all – it all withered to a dry husk.
By the wondrous, miraculous logic of Bernie Sanders’ own self-styled “revolution,” money falls upwards in a reverse rain of sticky, greasy, lint-laden nickels and dimes; a unique electoral approach to wedding democracy with capital and the illusion of its sundering; as if to say “Listen folks, that’s the direction money takes. What can I do?”, while the suckers pay tribute to their self-declared “socialist” padrone.
by Daniel Riccuito and R.J. Lambert