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Part I here

Motivation

Much has happened in the Democratic primaries since we circulated our Stop Sanders memo in March. This memo is to provide an update and emphasize the urgent threat that is Sanders and his democratic socialist movement in the United States.

Bernie Sanders is redefining the purpose of politics in the United States. We would like to preserve politics as a domain to conduct business, protect our class interests, material comfort, international engagements and pursue ambitions of dominion. However, Sanders is reconfiguring the bounds of imagination within the American public, that is quickly seeing politics as a tool to achieve broader goals of a cooperative, democratic human society. As French novelist Gustave Flaubert characterized our motivations in Madame Bovary,

“The bourgeoisie is characterized by intellectual and spiritual superficiality, raw ambition, shallow culture, a love of material things, greed, and above all a mindless parroting of sentiments and beliefs”

With his democratic socialist vision, Sanders is creating room for an alternative definition of a fulfilling existence. Our relentless and passionate pursuit of profit, property, and prestige within our peers is being challenged. Such a challenge is a composition of philosophical and spiritual differentiation, which dovetails into policy differences. While there are many policies proposed by Sanders that throw our worldview into question, few are more threatening than Medicare for All.

Medicare For All

Many of our peers have already expressed deep concerns with Medicare for All, not the least of which is that we would not be able to profit from disease, pain and human suffering. Our lavish existence, in part bolstered by investments in insurance companies, will be compromised as the public frees itself from financial bondage and transfers healthcare to the public domain.

However, the implications of this are more severe. There is a threat of a good example here. Should the public see that it is indeed more efficient to run healthcare insurance through a single-payer system under a democratic state, this will challenge one of the fundamental secular religions that uphold our privilege — that the responsible men, set free and then protected in laissez-faire markets, are the best stewards of our finances, resources and time.

Medicare does not seek profit and does not direct healthcare funds to lobbying, advertisements, and huge salaries and bonuses. Furthermore, the country will cumulatively benefit from eliminating redundant services and network bureaucracy due to the existence of a single payer — that is, less value extraction for us. If our prestigious private health insurance companies are replaced by such a system, and the good example exposes that private markets and monopolies are exploitative, profit-seeking and inefficient, one of the formative mythologies of neoliberal capitalism may collapse and similar questions will be asked of other industries, such as education, military, prisons. As some of you know, Sanders and his supporters are already challenging these profit centers as well.

Workplace Democracy

Sanders’ plans for empowering unions and bolstering labor rights directly threaten capital interests by fighting poor working conditions, wage theft, union-busting, underpayments and benefit cuts. These are elementary tools we use to maximize profits on our business income statements and minimize labor liabilities on our balance sheets. It is challenging another secular religion, that of profits at all costs. If markets are forced to serve labor and their communities, instead of the other way around, we are looking at a revision of our stature and prosperity in society. Capital interests will be forced to bow to human needs.

The secondary boycotts provision under Sanders’ plan is particularly concerning. It reinstates a union’s freedom of speech to take action to pressure clients and suppliers of companies opposing unions. This is an unconscionable attack on our interests. To see a society bonding over mutual interests, protecting their communities from exploitation, and paving the way to cooperation is unacceptable. This threat was made clear by Sanders at a progressive entrepreneurship forum in 1985, where he made the case for worker cooperatives. As he put it,

“What we are talking about here is a new vision about the relation of people to the work that they do. Now the fact of the matter is that many of us work forty, fifty, sixty hours a week, all over the United States of America. And we’ve become used to the way we relate to our employers. We understand and we accept it as a basic reality that we go to work for somebody else, that somebody else will decide the kind of product that will be produced, how it will be produced, where it will be produced and when it will be produced. And that somebody else has the right to say that, gee-whiz, we can’t make money in this town anymore, and we are going to leave and go to the Dominican Republic, where we can get workers for $2–$3 a day! Why do we have to pay all of $4/hr when we can get cheaper labor abroad? I, the owner, will make that decision, and you, the worker, you the community, that used to house this company, or this factory, or this office complex — tough luck! It’s mine, I own it! I will do as I please. And it seems to me that not only is it bad economics, but its very bad for the fiber and soul of the nation. Because what it does to people is that it makes all of us very child-like.Very infantile. Very dependent on the big daddy who has the money and can call the shots.”

Sanders is absolutely correct, and we must work to defeat him to keep it this way. As Adam Smith put it, we are “the masters of mankind,” and we pursue our “vile maxim”— all for ourselves and nothing for anyone else.

Combatting the Sanders Scourge

To eliminate this rising threat of democracy, an engaged body politic and disruptions to statecraft, we must first remind ourselves of the root of our power. While we do not subscribe to Humean philosophy, allow David Hume to express how we may control Sanders and his movement.

As Hume described in On the First Principles of Government described,

“Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than the ease with which the many are governed by the few; and the implicit submission, with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers.”

Hume was kind enough to resolve the paradox:

“When we enquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find that, as force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is, therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the freest and most popular.”

In other words, we must control public opinion and attitudes about this movement. While we encourage you to continue attacks about Sanders’ age, identity, and his radicalism as prescribed in the first memo, we must pollute the policy waters as well.

For instance, we urge you to continue to depict Medicare for All as elimination of insurance. Be sure to omit the elementary fact that private insurance persists until replaced by Medicare for All over a four year period. Just as instituting a $15/hr minimum wage deprives people of a $7.25/hr minimum wage, Medicare for All will deprive people of private insurance.

There are other lines we can employ to curb this movement. Several of these are summarized conveniently in the training video below. I urge everyone to review it thoroughly.

We will continue to send routine updates.

Long live the nobility.