I urge anyone who has not already done so to take the time to read this excellent article on truth-out.org. It's an excerpt from Noam Chomsky's latest book entitled What Kind of Creatures Are We?, which explores the roots of America's extremely class-centric system of government. As Chomsky rightly observes, the notion of an aristocratic ruling class goes back to the very earliest days of the post-colonial period.

This shriveled conception of democracy has solid roots. The founding fathers were much concerned about the hazards of democracy. In the debates of the Constitutional Convention, the main framer, James Madison, warned of these hazards. Naturally taking England as his model, he observed that "in England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place," undermining the right to property. To ward off such injustice, "our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation," arranging voting patterns and checks and balances so as "to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority," a prime task of decent government.

In truth, high blown rhetoric aside, the United States of America has never been about government of the people, by the people, for the people, and in fact the framers of the Constitution never remotely intended to implement such a system of government. They believed that in order to safeguard the property rights of the gentry, it was necessary to create a system in which the lesser classes would be given only a limited and heavily circumscribed role to play in setting government policy.

The solution was to ensure that society be fragmented, with limited public participation in the political arena, which is to be effectively in the hands of the wealthy and their agents. Scholarship generally agrees that "the Constitution was intrinsically an aristocratic document designed to check the democratic tendencies of the period," delivering power to a "better sort" of people and excluding "those who were not rich, well born, or prominent from exercising political power."

This, in a nutshell, is what I like to refer to as the Fallacy of the Wise Few, which was inspired a quote by the British philosopher and essayist Gilbert Chesterton: There are no wise few. Every aristocracy that has ever existed has behaved, in all essential points, exactly like a small mob. In recent years we have seen the bitter truth of this observation played out again and again. And as more and more power is concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the grotesqueness and malignancy of the elite's behavior becomes more and more pronounced.

This, then, is the operational model which people like the Clintons and Obamas are both products and beneficiaries of, and ardently wish to preserve. So too do those in the vassal class, such as Moulitsas, who derive both their livelihood and sense of identity from assiduously serving the interests of their betters. And this is why, in my view, there can be no meeting of the minds, and no real cooperative relationship between the minority egalitarian faction of the Democratic Party, as represented by Bernie Sanders, and the dominant elitist faction as embodied by Hillary Clinton. Realistically, you cannot really hope to reform a governmental structure that systematically denies any meaningful voice to the vast majority of citizens.

The choice, as I see it, is either to acquiesce to the current system of de facto economic apartheid, and all that it entails, or commit oneself to fighting it tooth and nail, with no quarter asked, and none given. Perhaps Moulitsas realizes this as well, which is why he is now more or less openly making known his intention to treat the egalitarian faction like (quoting once more from the truth-out article) "ignorant and meddlesome outsiders [who] must be put in their place."