This Election Is About What Will Be - It's About Forestalling Total Disaster In 2016

I am asked what I want if I don't want Bernie Sanders.  Well, there are lots of things I want but I don't for a second make the widespread mistake of thinking what I want is what this election is about.

It's about what will be, not what I want.  It's not even about what we want, if "we" means the left I'm a part of, the traditional American liberal left of equality, equal justice, economic justice,

What I want includes universal education sufficient to instill the knowledge to exercise the responsibilities and rights of an American but even as important in the moral foundation on which all of that rests. a love of humanity and the natural world we live in, an understanding that we owe each other and the world our best efforts to sustain them in a decent life to the best of our limited human abilities.  And that is true even as we inevitably fall short, at times.  

There are many parts to that, such as the abolition of the fortunes of the billionaires and obscenely rich who have corrupted everything they touch, with few exceptions.  Those few exceptions hardly begin to make up for the corruption.   The very rich are a luxury we can no longer afford, not the poor. In my wildest dreams they will be reduced to the middle class which will no longer be in the middle because I'm in favor of economic leveling, the poor raised up as the obscenely wealthy are lowered.  The very rich are the ones who have robbed the middle class, they and the electronic entertainment industry which is far more like the one imagined by George Orwell than any thinking person should find easy to accept and imbibe.  They are the property and tools of the billionaire-millionaire class, they serve them, not The People.   The idea that we owe them the special privileges granted by the short-sighted founders, as they destroy democracy is crazy.   We never owed them those, those should have been contingent on the service which our media does not give, accurately informing people of what they need to know to produce democracy.

I suppose one of the things I want is the destruction of the many fictions indulged in by the judiciary and legal system that lies are as worthy of legal protection as the truth, that the absolute grounding of democracy is not, in its most vital sense, totally and absolutely grounded in moral actions and beliefs and that without those there is no democracy.  The same court that accelerated the corruption of democracy with its rulings allowing the media to lie with impunity also began an illogical confusion that the non-establishment of religion meant that public institutions weren't there to instill an education into morality.   And the even worse opportunity for entertainment media to promote amoral depravity, replacing the absurd production codes that put married couples into twin beds with the cynical, cruel, bigotry spouting, Mammon worshiping obscenity that is the real education system by virtue of its ubiquity.   It is the school for fascism that never closes, its message is also omnipresent in a sense that Orwell's nightmare merely implies. It is the totalitarian church of Mammon.  That, friends, is a product of the lame-brained good intentions of the liberals on the Supreme Court in the 60s through today.   The confirmation of its result in fascist depravity is in its adoption by the worst of the far right in a string of decisions from Buckley v. Valeo to Citizens United and beyond, the phosphate car bomb that has destroyed our elections system, again on behalf of the billionaiare-millionaire class.

Fixing that is what I want, what I know will be the result of this election is not that, it is a brief opportunity to stop the Roberts, Alito, Thomas and Kennedy wing of the court from cementing their depravity in place for decades if not centuries - if we should last that long.   I have no doubt but that everyone who is running in this election, not least of whom, Bernie Sanders is invested in the wider system of depravity which produces the very things he rails against.   He will not appoint justices who will overturn the Sullivan Decision, I don't think he'd think that was a good idea.  He wouldn't alter the series of disastrously out of touch supreme court rulings which, just as they made lies equal to the truth, made immorality the equal of morality.   All of them are fully invested in the insane way of thinking that allows those to stand even as their entirely predictable results become ever worse and threaten to destroy us, quite literally.   The regime of thinking which produced that ability to refuse to see how the results came from those choices in the courts and in government and in society and the intellectual basis of those choices, is ubiquitous among the educated class.   The very idea that it was "the process" that mattered and that the results didn't, is one part of that regime of so-called enlightenment thought that I'll write more about, soon.  For, make no mistake about it, the idiocy that produced this disaster is another product of that 18th century fashion, one that is absurdly reverenced today.

So, you see, my desires are extremely ambitious, they are radical, far more radical than anything Bernie Sanders ever promoted, more radical than anything you're going to read on Alternet, in The Nation, more radical than Occupy was or whatever temporary-doomed-to-fail vanguard of any ever newer left will articulate.

But this election, any election is not about what I want, it's about what will be.  It's about forestalling total disaster in 2016.