Thread by @ClaireBerlinski

Beginning with Part II: "An Agenda for a New America."
(Bernie, for those just tuning in.)

Chapter One: Defeating Oligarchy.

He begins by defining democracy: "one person, one vote." "The right of a free people to control their destiny. Not kings or queens or Czars."

He appeals to the Declaration of Independence, and for emphasis repeats "Their just powers from the consent of the governed," in italics.

He repeats: one person, one vote.

Entailing:

-an equal opportunity for all who seek public office.
-the wealthy don't have undue influence over the election process.
-voting is as easy and convenient as possible, with no discrimination against the poor, old, young, or people of color when they want to vote.

"It should mean that the United States has one of the highest voting turnouts in the world, not one of the lowest."

(I've never been able to understand our low voter turnout. Is it a sign that people are basically happy? Or a sign, as he suggests, of complete despair?)

"It should mean that political consciousness is high and that people are aware and well-informed about the major challenges our nation is facing."

I don't like the Marxist sound of "high political consciousness."

I agree, however, that it's a problem for a democracy when the demos is poorly informed.

We get a quick history of America: The revolutionaries fought for the right to be governed by themselves, not by an autocratic monarch across the Atlantic, to create a new kind of society, a democratic society, unique in the world at its time (good).

But the Constitution, while revolutionary in its day, reflected the values and mores of the 1790s: slavery, racism, rigid class lines, sexism. (bad)

We get the Civil War in a paragraph; the 14th Amendment, the 15th, the civil rights movement, 1965 Voting Rights Act, the 19th, the 24th. "All citizens must have the right to vote, regardless of their economic status."

All of that is fairly uncontroversial, I should think.

But, he says, sadly, there are people today who want to roll back the clock of history. Enter the oligarchs.

"While they don't announce their intentions on the front page of the newspapers, their goal is clear: They want to move our country toward an oligarchic form of society in which almost all economic and political power rests with a handful of multibillionaire families."

"They are not content with controlling most of our economy and owning an outlandish percentage of our national wealth. Now they want to own the government as well."

"Tragically, they are succeeding."

The villains here: "powerful special interests," "Republicans," "the wealthiest people in this country," "the largest corporations" and Citizens United.

Result: a huge amount of advertising coming from phony front groups owned and controlled by a handful of billionaires. "Big money" determines the outcome of elections.

(Note: This suppressed premise is that ad spending determines voter behavior: Voters are incapable of voting in their own interests because they're brainwashed by advertising. This is a debatable point.)

This advertising is mere pocket change for "the barons of the fossil fuel industry, Wall Street and banking, defense contracting, the pharmaceutical industry, and more."

The oligarchs, he writes, understand that a right-wing judiciary is important to their goals, so they spend lavishly to get them elected or appointed.

The power of the oligarchs goes beyond this, he writes. They own "the media, think tanks, university chairs, and political front groups." They "influence American public opinion and domestic and foreign policy in ways that few realize."

(NB: This is the architecture of every conspiracy theory in history.)

The oligarchs have created a "climate denial movement." They've used their massive advertising budget to "limit media coverage of this vitally important issue."

We're entering crackpot territory on the double- quicktime.

Any time you hear a report from an "independent nonpartisan think tank" that disagrees with Bernie about climate, health care, or taxation, well, "Let's not be naive." The billionaires, he reveals, are funding those think tanks.

(Billionaires, in this account, are implicitly assigned the same point of view; there's no such thing as a billionaire who funds left-wing think tanks; and no such thing as an independent researcher: they can all be bought off.)

(Elements of this criticism are correct: Some think-tanks are a racket; some billionaires fund shoddy research. From this observation, he derives a lunatic conspiracy theory.)

He warns us never to trust a group that calls itself "Concerned citizens for this" or "Concerned citizens for that." "Check out which group of billionaires funds their activities."

So far: My heart is sinking.