A Political Revolution IS the Pragmatic Course When the System is Rigged
By definition, a rigged system predetermines certain outcomes, that's what “rigging” means. That this happens in America is no longer a matter for speculation, if it ever was. The near constant and massive transfer of wealth from the middle and working classes to the wealthiest one percent of Americans over the last thirty five years offers clear evidence of that. Elections and recessions come and go but vast income inequality just increases, at an increasingly alarming rate. The system enshrined in our constitution was once deemed revolutionary, with populist forces carefully balanced by institutional checks and balances. Those political checks and balances are gone. What remains are large campaign contribution checks drawn off fattened corporate balance sheets. When corruption is embedded in the software of democracy there seldom is need for overt bribes. The algorithms inserted by those who design the codes inevitably, in aggregate, produce favorable outcomes for them. Year in and year out the return on their investments may vary, but the trend line never does.
That's why a search for individual examples of specific quid pro quos is so fundamentally misleading. There's little need to micro manage each politicians every move in a crooked game, that's the advantage of rigging an entire system rather than paying for specific votes. Much like casinos in Las Vegas with their myriad slot machines, Wall Street and associates don't have to control the pull of every lever, the fix runs deeper than that. At the end of each session of Congress the oligarchy always come out ahead, taking in more than they pay out. The men and women who cast their votes there already know which side their bread is buttered on, and where big pay checks will await them whenever they finally leave office – by choice or by defeat.
Confining efforts to alter the current status quo to parliamentary maneuvers inside a fraudulent political system is tantamount to an electoral loss concession speech acknowledging the impossibility of systematic change. A rigged system is the classic closed loop, left to run indefinitely without outside interference there is no mechanism to change it's course. Faced with a massive self perpetuating machine, attempting to disable it with the tools readily at hand is not the practical approach, not if what is within your reach is a set of phillips head screwdrivers and what is needed is a fleet of bulldozers. It doesn't matter how skilled a technician is, how experienced, how tenacious, or how passionately committed to eventually getting the job done she may be, if the tools that can be wielded by an individual alone pale before the task at hand.
The leverage simply does not exist inside of a rigged system to alter the course that it's on. The status quo is not set up to change the status quo. Something new must intercede to counteract governing inertia, and in this context the word revolutionary is correctly applied. The promise of pragmatic political change is meaningless without measuring an incremental approach against the task at hand and what ultimately must be accomplished. The course of least resistance offers the least resistance for a reason – that which is less crucially defended is often less crucial to defend, from the perspective of those resisting change. They don't have to win every battle, just the central one.
The course of least resistance now is to simply designate a champion to advance our cause as President. Hillary Clinton is among the more skillful political inside players I have witnessed in my lifetime, and clearly she possesses great personal abilities. I don't think her heart is in the wrong place, but her campaign message in essence comes down to “I can and will fight hard for you - It's OK, I've got this.” Clinton knows her way around the halls of power, in some ways that's an advantage, but even if Hillary were Super Woman, she can not manage this alone – not even with Bill at her side. It will take more than a very strong woman to reverse the effects of a system that's long been rigged against the overwhelming majority of Americans. It will take more than a village. It will take a full fledged movement.
Bernie Sanders gets it. He gets it emotionally, he gets it intellectually, and he gets it strategically. That is how he got there, standing alone on a debate stage beside Hillary Clinton, a serious contender to become our next President. Sanders couldn't get there alone. He knew that and he planned accordingly. Bernie counted on a large movement to support him reaching this point: to fund him with small donations, to organize at the grass roots level below the radar of establishment politics, and to break through the media embargo placed around his populist message through millions of tweets and posts, through viral videos shared and through word of mouth. Bernie Sanders has demonstrated that he knows how to take on a system rigged against him/us with his integrity fully intact, beholden to no one but the people on whose behalf he is running, counting on the public to have his back, not just the other way around.
In 2010, two years after the Great Recession struck our nation down, while tens of millions were still suffering from it, talk in our nation's capital centered largely on deficit reduction. Conventional wisdom then held that entitlement spending needed to be reined in, and that cost of living increases for Social Security recipients had to be recalculated because they were too generous as they were. Debates weren't ongoing over how much to expand “food stamp” relief for the hungry, they were over how deeply that should be “trimmed” instead. Simultaneously temporary tax cuts on the first several hundred thousands of dollars a year that the wealthy earned weren't allowed to lapse, they were made permanent instead. Income inequality wasn't high on the national agenda, and the media and our politicians rarely mentioned it before the Occupy Wall Street movement seized our public squares with their prolonged encampments.
In a similar vein repeated lethal police shootings of unarmed predominantly minority citizens never elicited much in the way sustained public attention - outside of minority communities - until the Black Lives Matter movement took to the streets and refused to be silenced. This is nothing new to anyone who has studied the role that movements play in transforming our nation, when the establishment starts out hell bent on not changing; from the Labor movement to the Woman’s Suffrage Movement, to the Civil Rights Movement, to the Anti War and Environmental movements and more.
If you believe that what's needed to undo the damage caused by our rigged economic and political system is to install a strong experienced and dedicated woman as our next President – then Hillary Clinton may have the skill set you are looking for. If instead you believe that it will take a strong and sustained movement that will not disband after election day to change what is wrong with America, then Bernie Sanders has the demonstrated skill set needed to mobilize and engage one for that effort. Failure is never the pragmatic choice, no matter how incremental it may be. It comes down to a simple question: What will it take to turn things around?
