"Let me make it clear that I don't harbor any idealized notion of politics and democracy," he said in a 2013 speech to NYU's Brennan Center for Justice, followed by a quip: "I worked for Lyndon Johnson, remember?"

But, he added in that speech, "there is nothing idealized or romantic about the difference between a society whose arrangements roughly serve all its citizens and one whose institutions have been converted into a stupendous fraud. That difference can be the difference between democracy and oligarchy."

Ultimately, he was right. And not just about that."

much more at the thread link