Will Democrats learn "all the wrong lessons" from Bernie's candidacy?

The Bernie fans are all yelling "Yeah! What he said!" for Matt Taibbi's angry, intemperate, and profane piece in Rolling Stone.

And he is basically peddling the same political malarkey the Bernie fans have been peddling all along, as if the phenomenon of two insurgencies of outsiders attempting to take over the machinery and agendas of the two major parties proves that what the country really supports and wants is the outlook and agenda of exactly one of them, guess which.

You're right, that one would be the one that lost; the one whose leader was in fact repudiated utterly by voters registered as members of the party he and his followers have never been shy to insist they loathe, all over the country.

And so the Democratic Party should hand itself over to the Sanders revolutionaries, he says.

Sure thing.

But it is exactly that that would be the wrong lesson.

The truth is that both parties suffer an excess of democracy that has opened them up to takeover by people fundamentally hostile to the parties as institutions as well as to the constitutionally defined institutions of the republic.

Both parties should abolish caucuses, allow primaries in fewer states, and close voting in them to people not registered for at least a year as members.

And they should allow a bigger role for elected officials and party officers as super-delegates, unbound on every ballot.

Organized activists need to have a smaller role, not donors; donors' influence on the parties and their agendas is on the whole less pernicious and hostile to American institutions and American capitalism than that of activists.

But the parties will not learn these lessons.

Here are some snips from MT's piece.

Democrats Will Learn All the Wrong Lessons From Brush With Bernie

For MT, it's all beltway insiders (aka "the establishment" and "the crooked system") vs real, working Americans.

If they had any brains, Beltway Dems and their clucky sycophants like Capeheart would not be celebrating this week. 

They ought to be horrified to their marrow that the all-powerful Democratic Party ended up having to dig in for a furious rally to stave off a quirky Vermont socialist almost completely lacking big-dollar donors or institutional support.

. . . .

The twin insurgencies of Trump and Sanders this year were equally a blistering referendum on Beltway politics. 

But the major-party leaders and the media mouthpieces they hang out with can't see this, because of what that friend of mine talked about over a decade ago: 

Washington culture is too far up its own backside to see much of anything at all.

. . . .

The maddening thing about the Democrats is that they refuse to see how easy they could have it. 

If the party threw its weight behind a truly populist platform, if it stood behind unions and prosecuted Wall Street criminals and stopped taking giant gobs of cash from every crooked transnational bank and job-exporting manufacturer in the world, they would win every election season in a landslide.

This is especially the case now that the Republican Party has collapsed under the weight of its own nativist lunacy. 

It's exactly the moment when the Democrats should feel free to become a real party of ordinary working people.

But they won't do that, because they don't see what just happened this year as a message rising up from millions of voters.

Politicians are so used to viewing the electorate as a giant thing to be manipulated that no matter what happens at the ballot, they usually can only focus on the Washington-based characters they perceive to be pulling the strings. 

Through this lens, the uprising among Democratic voters this year wasn't an organic expression of mass disgust, but wholly the fault of Bernie Sanders, who within the Beltway is viewed as an oddball amateur and radical who jumped the line.

Is it really a coincidence that many of the opinionists who say MT speaks for them also wrote very favorably of Constitutional Disobedience when it came out?

Probably not.

These are people who are not merely indifferent to our institutions but who positively loathe them.

No wonder they laugh at protests to lunatic rulings by the Supremes that further their agendas.