Our feral elite may be oblivious but through their actions they are teaching us valuable lessons. From their unconcern during the Covid 19 pandemic, to their connections to Jefferey Epstein, to their commitment for Israel’s Gaza genocide, to their enthusiastic push for AI surveillance, to their hostility to progressive candidates, they are showcasing their vast sociopathy.

The Platner campaign and defenestration are a useful window in which to understand our feral elite and their priorities. Rebecca Traister on MSNOW says Platner was always disliked by establishment Maine and national Democrats, largely because he brought people real hope for change. The Democratic Party and elite operatives were eager to jettison Platner and his ability to electrify voters eager for a new politics and a new national direction.

Lately it’s become apparent that we can have phony “hope and change” or “make America great again” but anything that disrupts our flight into kleptocracy must be violently repressed. Donald Trump is the poster-child for our dystopia but, as I’ve repeatedly stated, he’s simply one of the more grotesque symptoms of our decades long neoliberal looting expedition.

At Naked Capitalism, Curro Jimenez writes–Winning Became the Shared Ethos of the US Oligarchy, and reexamines Joan Didion’s splendid political discourse.“People inside the process, constituting as they do, a self-created and self-referring class, a new kind of managerial elite, tend to speak of the world not necessarily as it is but as they want people out there to believe it is,” wrote Joan Didion in her seminal essay Insider Baseball for The New York Review of Books in 1988.

By “people out there,” Didion meant the average American. The political discourse is built for them to hear, not to reflect reality. Its purpose is to manage them and convince them that “the process” is working. The only difference between Trump and other U.S. politicians is that he has changed the tune, but not the genre.

When we talk about the process, then, we are talking, increasingly, not about “the democratic process,” or the general mechanism affording the citizens of a state a voice in its affairs, but the reverse: a mechanism seen as so specialized that access to it is correctly limited to its own professionals, to those who manage policy and those who report on it, to those who run the polls and those who quote them, to those who ask and those who answer the questions on the Sunday shows, to the media consultants, to the columnists, to the issues advisers, to those who give the off-the-record breakfasts and to those who attend them; to that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life.“

Didion describes our feral elite as an exclusive club composed of politicians, campaign strategists, corporate donors, and elite journalists. They pretend to oppose each other on TV, print, or social media, but they live in the same upscale neighborhoods, vacation together at Aspen or Deer Valley, and share the exact same class interests.

The “process” as Dideon describes it, has become more sophisticated and thanks to Citizens United, way more expensive, where campaign donations are solicited from billionaires by the two political parties, candidates and PAC’s then funneled through elite consultants for television ads, where much of the money gets returned to the billionaire owners of the corporate media. Like I said, it’s a big club and you ain’t in it.

One of Platner’s best received lines was “I’m not afraid to name an enemy. And the enemy is the oligarchy. It’s the billionaires who pay for it and the politicians who sell us out.” His campaign with its focus on this power arrangement coupled with the possibility of change threatened this cozy arrangement and that’s why he was ratfucked.

This is post-neoliberal politics, where the big club has destroyed the New Deal reforms that somewhat economically leveled and democratized our country. Now it’s faux politics, where they pretend to do things for us but in reality just do things for their benefactors–the corporations and banks owned by billionaires.

They are making clear that this process is off limits to democracy, and that trying to work within the system is a fools errand. The massive reforms that are required cannot be accomplished with the system we have. The institutions have been abused for too long and are now broken. Our elite are the enemy and have demonstrated that there are no limits to what they will do to prevent the kind of change for which Platner represented.