Why a President Bernie Sanders won't work for America

"The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain worldview and a certain way of life... A ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its successors... Who wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same."

- George Orwell.

Die-hard progressives still loyal to the Democratic Party have come out swinging hard for Bernie Sanders for president like a pack of flailing undead Babe Ruths. With Elizabeth Warren on the sidelines – at least for now – "Ready for Bernie" campaigners are desperately courting Warren supporters to build a progressive base worthy of a challenge to Hillary Clinton's Wall Street candidacy.

Their horse blinder logic is sound. Bernie Sanders will need all the help he can muster if he hopes to defeat Hillary Clinton to win the Democratic nomination. The former First Lady expects to raise and spend $2.5 billion in her presidential bid, more than Obama and Romney spent combined, on their 2012 campaigns. By a very sharp divide, Sanders hopes to raise between $40 and $50 million.

Sanders shrugged off the monumental task of competing with Clinton's orotund Super PAC funds.

"The question to me is not whether we can raise as much money as our opponents – we can – the question is whether we can raise enough money to run a strong, credible and winning campaign," Sanders said at a press conference earlier this month when he announced his bid for the presidency.

Bernie Sanders is wrong on both points. He won't raise as much money as Hillary Clinton. Not in this lifetime, not unless he gets into the Super PAC game, which he said he won't. More profoundly, Sanders' decision to shed his independent skin and run as a Democrat doesn't earn him any credibility whatsoever as an opposition candidate. Progressives may have brushed two terms of Obama under the carpet, but the rest of the world remembers what the "Lesser of Two Evils Party" has produced since 2009 – namely, a huge, steaming pile of George W Bush policies on steroids.

A Sanders presidency, however unlikely, would only serve the oligarchic system already in place. There's a script, and Sanders would follow it – as he has already demonstrated with his pro-Israel, "bomb-the-f***-out-of-Palestine" stance. Sanders supporters would be better off advocating for real change from another platform altogether.

Ready for... You?

"If you want change you can believe in, destroy the system," Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges wrote in his piece for Truthdig recently. "And changing the system does not mean collaborating with it as Bernie Sanders is doing by playing by the cooked rules of the Democratic Party. Profound social and political transformation is acknowledged in legislatures and courts but never initiated there. Radical change always comes from below."

In an oligarchic pyramid scheme, we are "The Below". There is no political right or left. There's only top-down.

The evidence for the American oligarchy that Hedges acknowledges is pretty straightforward from an empirical perspective. A Princeton study concluded after examining over 1,800 policy initiatives from 1981 to 2002, that business interests and the wealthy elites run the show despite the will of voters, lending credence to Hedges' stark, but realistic perspective that we need to spend less energy on electing presidents, and more time in the activist's weight room, developing muscles to do the heavy-lifting of democracy for ourselves.

"The central point that emerges from our research is that economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on US government policy," authors of the Princeton study write, "while mass-based interest groups and average citizens have little or no independent influence."

As Orwell rightly pointed out, and as a progressive, Obama has famously proven, who wields power is not important in an oligarchy. The structure of power is guaranteed to safeguard the interests of power elites at the top of the pyramid scheme. The Democratic and Republican parties only serve this system by the grace of our compliance. We must invert this pyramid by way of massive resistance if we're up to the challenge of doing the dirty work of real democracy ourselves. Bernie Sanders won't do it for us as a rebranded Democrat, no matter how much we cheer him on to an ultimate defeat that even a dead Nostradamus could easily predict.