Bernie Sanders is Ron Paul, They’re Both Grifters, and You’re a Chump
The Cathedral’s Dangly Toys
The Twitter guru Zero HP Lovecraft recently posted a visual compendium of our actual government:
This works according to both left and right-wing critiques of our current system. The only divergence, as Zero points out, is that Left-wingers focus on the Factory, Rights on the Bureau. However, the Center-Left controls the Cathedral.
The result is, just as it says, a “decentralized oligarchy”, which is somewhat redundant. The sharing of power among the select is precisely what oligarchies are meant to accomplish. And as it is a partially hidden oligarchy, with a Zaphod Beeblebrox-esque distraction, it can retain power for a long time.
Thus, anything which is part of the Show is irrelevant (is Donald Trump the Show’s last gasp at actual power? Who knows?). This includes anyone who has spent any long time in elected office. Everyone who’s survived there has done so by making themselves amenable to the Bureau, the Cathedral, or the Factory. There are no exceptions.
Understanding this will make clear why ideological populists fail to produce results. Nominally, Bernie Sanders is a bomb-throwing revolutionary; in reality, he’s just another career politician with four houses who has been serving the System as long as Joe Biden has. The reason Bernie did not win the Democratic nomination in the last two election cycles is because he was not supposed to.
Any man who actually wanted to win would have waived the bloody shirt of Hilary Clinton’s emails like a matador provoking a bull. Instead, he publicly announced that he was sick of hearing about them, as if he was a disinterested observer to the question of whether Clinton abused the position of her office. But this question ought to have been central to the entire theme of his campaign: that the centrist neoliberals are betraying the American People. It was right there in front of him. It was low-hanging fruit. He refused it because he was supposed to.
We observe the same this year. Prior to the Super Tuesday primary, the large field of candidates simply vanished, handing Joe Biden a lopsided victory. But Bernie wasn’t out. He’d won California by a sizable majority. He was the clear second choice of many. He could have fought back. He didn’t because he wasn’t supposed to. That is not his purpose. His purpose is to absorb populist energy and feed as much of it as he can to the System’s preferred targets. That is why the “OK Boomer” girl is now urging people to go vote (for Biden).
There is simply no reason for a man who has, officially, stood outside the Democratic Party establishment his entire career, to be so accommodating of them when the moment demanded. This is Sanders’ purpose. This is why he is in politics.
We see the same thing with Republicans. Ron Paul was officially an anarchist libertarian of the purest kind. In reality, however much he voted against every spending bill on Constitutionalist grounds, somehow sufficient pork went back to his district. As with Sanders, the purpose of Ron Paul was not to create a libertarian-constitutionalist upswelling within the Republican party, but to inure libertarian-constitutionalists to voting for the eventual Republican nominee. Sure, John McCain and Mitt Romney weren’t very libertarian, but better them than Obama, right? Once you care enough to vote in the primary, odds are you’ll care enough to vote in the general. In for a pound, in for a penny.
This may seem irrelevant two weeks away from the Presidential election, and eight years after the last time Ron Paul was in one. But we cannot have the government or nation we want unless we accurately assess the one we have. A revolution, every now and again, is a healthy thing.
One thought further: if the above graph is accurate, precisely what is it that keeps the Castle “fully contained”? No doubt it is many things, such as the management of its upper echelons by the Bureau. But I wonder how much depends upon the success of the Show. If the soldiers ever fully realize that they truly serve the System, rather than the People, then that containment might indeed start to leak, in small drips, then a torrent. Aristotle observed the shift from oligarchy to tyranny along similar lines.
