GOVERNMENT IS THE PROBLEM.

Bill Moyers, who parlayed a stint as Lyndon Johnson's press secretary into a lifetime role as public scold, recently departed this life.  Common Dreams reprinted his "The Oligarchy vs. The People," which does a pretty good job of making the case that government is too easily captured by rent-seekers.  That Public Action, though, is For Your Own Good, Deplorable.

When I began reporting on the state legislature while a student at the University of Texas, a wily old state senator offered to acquaint me with how the place worked. We stood at the back of the Senate floor as he pointed to his colleagues spread out around the chamber -- playing cards, napping, nipping, winking at pretty young visitors in the gallery -- and he said to me, "If you think these guys are bad, you should see the people who sent them there."

And yet, despite the flaws and contradictions of human nature -- or perhaps because of them -- something took hold here. The American people forged a civilization: that thin veneer of civility stretched across the passions of the human heart.

What do I keep telling you about losing skippers blaming the wind?  Those Texas senators?  Was any other outcome possible given their constituents?  That "thin veneer of civility" is an emergent phenomenon, and it's too easy for the Men of System not to Leave Well Enough Alone.

Capitalism produces winners and losers big time. The winners use their wealth to gain political power, often through campaign contributions and lobbying. In this way, they only increase their influence over the choices made by the politicians indebted to them. While there are certainly differences between Democrats and Republicans on economic and social issues, both parties cater to wealthy individuals and interests seeking to enrich their bottom lines with the help of the policies of the state (loopholes, subsidies, tax breaks, deregulation). No matter which party is in power, the interests of big business are largely heeded.

More on that later, but first, a confession. The legendary broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow told his generation of journalists that bias is okay as long as you don't try to hide it. Here's mine: plutocracy and democracy don't mix. As the late (and great) Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis said, "We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both." Of course the rich can buy more homes, cars, vacations, gadgets, and gizmos than anyone else, but they should not be able to buy more democracy. That they can and do is a despicable blot on American politics.

His salary as court intellectual to Lyndon Johnson and the heirs to the New Deal Administrative State depended on his not seeing the generation of rents that administrative state made possible.  Thus, his essay denounces all the usual suspects: neoliberalism, prosperity gospels, resentment of the poors; only to miss the original sin.

Our founders warned against the power of privileged factions to capture the machinery of democracies. James Madison, who studied history through a tragic lens, saw that the life cycle of previous republics had degenerated into anarchy, monarchy, or oligarchy. Like many of his colleagues, he was well aware that the republic they were creating could go the same way. Distrusting, even detesting concentrated private power, the founders attempted to erect safeguards to prevent private interests from subverting the moral and political compact that begins, "We, the people." For a while, they succeeded.

When the brilliant young French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville toured America in the 1830s, he was excited by the democratic fervor he witnessed. Perhaps that excitement caused him to exaggerate the equality he celebrated. Close readers of de Tocqueville will notice, however, that he did warn of the staying power of the aristocracy, even in this new country. He feared what he called, in the second volume of his masterwork, Democracy in America, an "aristocracy created by business." He described it as already among "the harshest that ever existed in the world" and suggested that, "if ever a permanent inequality of conditions and aristocracy again penetrate the world, it may be predicted that this is the gate by which they will enter."

And so it did, but capture by business interests required capture by intellectual interests for whom those Constitutional restraints were an annoyance, and for whom luxury beliefs created the alliance of corporate interests and Militant Normals we understand as Make America Great Again.  We go from Bill Moyers slagging on those Texas Deplorables to Rahm Emanuel hoping not to have a crisis go to waste.  "Democrats once were a big tent party until it became college-educated intellectuals 'sitting around telling everybody how to live their lives, and they were coastal, etc.'"  What does he see?  Why, a different sort of inequality of conditions and aristocracy.

"Now to the core question, why do Democrats have a problem? Because we're punks, and we not only talk like punks, we talk down to people, we get caught up in a set of issues that aren't relevant," he said. "Think about all this about transgender in sports, etc. There's hundreds of thousands of NCAA athletes and there's 10 transgender athletes in sports in their website. This is crazy. As I said in education, we have the worst reading scores and math scores in 30 years, and we're arguing about bathrooms and locker rooms and not the classroom?"

After warning Democrats against fighting over pronouns, using the term "Latinx" and calling to defund the police, he argued that their understanding of "kitchen table issues" needs to go far beyond economic concerns.

Well, yes, mentally disturbed boys in girls' sports, illegal aliens undercutting tradesmens' wages, and hometown heroes being sent off to nation-building wars whilst being indoctrinated about gender-fluidity might affect peoples' lives in ways more evident than whatever favors to business interests there are in the latest continuing resolution out of Washington.