Don't you just love it when reactionaries instruct liberals on how to be liberal and win elections?

::::::::

I have to be honest. In this election season, with all the attacks on Bernie, the support of "liberal" centrism, and defense of the status quo, I can't help feeling discouraged almost depressed.

My most recent source of near despair was a New York Times op-ed last Thursday by conservative columnist David Brooks. The piece was called "No, Not Sanders, Not Ever."

Despite authorship by a conservative, it pretended to voice sympathetically the so-called "liberal" wisdom that Brooks claimed should prevail among Democrats. (Don't you just love it when reactionaries instruct liberals on how to be liberal and win elections?)

To begin with, Brooks openly red-baited the Senator from Vermont. He brazenly associated him with the Soviet Union's slaughter of 20 million people, with mass executions and intentional famines. He connected Bernie with slavery, Cuba, Nicaragua, communism, Nazism, and Trumpian populism.

Meanwhile, he praised Hubert Humphrey, Ted Kennedy, and Elizabeth Warren, because as true liberals, they "worked within the system, negotiated and practiced the art of politics." He heaped similar accolades on F.D.R. who unlike Sanders "did not think America was a force for ill in world affairs." None of the above, Brooks said not Humphrey, Kennedy, Warren or Franklin Roosevelt thought or thinks that "the whole system is irredeemably corrupt."

However, while reading Brooks' attacks, I couldn't help thinking: but what if Senator Sanders is right? What if the entire system is beyond the pale and liberalism simply doesn't work? What if political opponents in the party of Trump and McConnell ensure that it doesn't work by absolutely refusing to cooperate with Brooks' liberals (as he put it) "in the traditional way: building coalitions, working within the constitutional system and crafting the sort of compromises you need in a complex, pluralistic society?" What if (as I've suggested elsewhere) the entire system been successfully seized in a coup d'e'tat by nihilists, mobsters, pedophiles, and blackmailers by the Republican Party which Noam Chomsky has identified as the most dangerous organization in the history of the world?

Finally, what if such suspicions about complete systemic breakdown are confirmed by the evidence including:

• An entrenched level of wealth-inequality unprecedented since the Gilded Age
• Capture of both parties (Republican and Democrat) by the nation's richest 1%
• The extreme politicization of the Supreme Court in favor of those same wealthy Elites
• The Court's Citizens United decision enabling billionaires to buy politicians (and the presidency itself!)
• Resulting legal preference of corporate personalities over human persons
• A two-tier legal system allowing the rich and powerful to perjure themselves, defy subpoenas, and/or receive light sentences for severe white-collar crimes, while harshly punishing the poor for relatively minor offenses
• The triumph of the Military-Industrial Complex expressed in policies of permanent war
• Climate-change denial and dismantling of environmental protection laws
• The 75-year process of hollowing out Roosevelt's New Deal and destruction of the labor movement
• Rigging of the election process through voter suppression laws, gerrymandering, untrustworthy voting machines, and super-delegate arrangements
• The consolidation of the mainstream media into a few corporate hands
• The militarization of police forces too-often manned by trigger-happy jingoists, racists, xenophobes, homophobes, and misogynists
• All-pervading systems of surveillance specifically geared to prevent rebellion

Doesn't all of that (and so much more) describe a system that actually is irredeemable aside from complete revolution?

What I'm suggesting is that the Brooks piece and the evidence just advanced show how everything seems stacked against the naïve liberalism Brooks favors. Instead, the country's condition cries out for radical reform. "America" has become a place where the injustices just listed seem baked into the structures of our lives. And the baking process involves laws that increasingly serve the elite and punish the rest of us. (In fact, isn't that what laws are? They are largely products of the rich and powerful concocted to ensure that they remain rich and powerful.) All of us should be angry about all of that. If not, we're probably not paying attention.

When Bernie says the system is corrupt, that's what he means. The changes required to make it less corrupt are common sense and involve structural and legal changes that would embody measures far more profound than even the Vermont senator proposes. I'm talking about small-"d" democratic steps such as the following:

• Abolition of the Electoral College
• Public funding of elections
• Creation of a bi-partisan National Electoral Commission to oversee elections in all 50 states all governed by the same rules and responsible for creating electoral districts
• Automatic universal voter registration connected with one's birthday or automobile licensing
• Establishment of a national holiday for quadrennial and biennial elections
• Practical recognition of the fact that corporations are not people while restoring corporate tax levels to the 1968 level of 50%
• Enforcement of a revitalized anti-trust regime to limit the size and power of corporations
• Expanding Supreme Court membership to include an equal number of liberals and conservatives
• Cutting the military budget by 40% to bring it in line with similar expenditures by other nations
• Cessation of all current wars and withdrawal of U.S. forces from most (if not all) overseas locations
• Redirection of the billions thus saved into a Green New Deal
• Passage of laws to encourage formation of worker-directed cooperatives to compete on an equal playing field with private corporations
• Commitment to the inviolability of international law as enforced by the United Nations
• Withdrawal of support from countries (like Israel, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia) that refuse to conform to international law
• De-criminalization of drug possession and de-privatization of all prisons

Now those steps are truly radical. They go to the heart of the matter which is lack of democracy here in the United States. Their mere listing reveals not only the corruption of the present system, but the deep law-enforced entrenchment of corporate power exercised by the nation's rich and powerful.

No, Mr. Brooks, Bernie Sanders is not a dangerous man. And yes, absent his nomination, it will remain true that "the whole system is irredeemably corrupt."

Bernie Sanders is actually quite moderate. The "remorseless class war" he addresses is a fact of life initiated by the 1%, not by Bernie. However, he represents a decisive step towards winning that war.

Authors Website: http://mikerivageseul.wordpress.com/

Authors Bio:

Mike Rivage-Seul is a liberation theologian and former Roman Catholic priest. His undergraduate degree in philosophy was received from St. Columban's Major Seminary in Milton Massachusetts and awarded through D.C.'s Catholic University. He received his theology licentiate from the Atheneum Anselmianum and his doctorate in moral theology (magna cum laude) from the Academia Alfonsiana in Rome where Mike studied for five years. There he also played club basketball for Eurosport and a team within Rome's Stella Azzurra professional organization. In 1972 he served for a year as coordinator of volunteers in Monsignor Ralph Beiting's Christian Appalachian Project. Then for 40 years, Mike taught theology and general studies at Berea College in Kentucky receiving its Seabury Award for excellence in teaching, Berea's highest faculty award. At Berea, Mike founded its Peace and Social Justice Studies program. He and his wife, Peggy, also organized and started the Berea Interfaith Taskforce for Peace. For years, he periodically taught liberation theology in a Latin American Studies Program in Costa Rica sponsored by the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities. In Costa Rica Mike and Peggy were fellows at the liberation theology research institute, the Departamento Ecumenico de Investigaciones (DEI) headed by the great Franz Hinkelammert. In Mexico, they also served as fellows and program directors in San Miguel de Allende's Center for Global Justice. Mike's studies and teaching have brought him to countries across Europe and to Cuba (on 10 occasions), Nicaragua (12 occasions), Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Israel, India, Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Brazil where he and Peggy were associates of Paulo Freire. Mike's languages include Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, Italian, German, Portuguese, and Spanish. For three years he was a monthly columnist at the Lexington Herald-Leader in Lexington Kentucky. He has contributed more than 400 articles to the online news source OpEdNews where he is a senior editor. He has also published in the DEI's Pasos Journal, in the National Catholic Reporter and Christianity Today. His scholarship has been cited in the New York Times. Mike has authored or edited 10 books including one of poetry and a novel based on his experiences in Cuba. His latest book is The Magic Glasses of Critical Thinking: seeing through alternative fact & fake news (Peter Lang publishers). He blogs at http://mikerivageseul.wordpress.com/ Attempting to appropriate his identity as an ordained exorcist (all Catholic priests are), Mike also reads Tarot cards. He is a lifelong golfer and Chicago Cubs fan.