I’ve checked out a few YouTube videos of John Keane. Ron Paul must have been inspired by his hairdo.
My take on John Keane is that he associates liberalism, the left, and capitalism with democracy as defined by the thoughts and actions around the time of the French Revolution. I think the etymology of those terms have changed since the 18th century, but that’s a whole book-long story in itself.
Referring to Trump as "35", and others more ambiguously, Keane thinks there is an imminent threat to democracy: populism leading to totalitarianism. He calls his solution ‘monitory democracy’. To summarize, he advocates for participatory power, reinvention of parties, changing electoral laws, and building up institutions to deal with policy challenges that are on the agenda. Other ‘inventions’ include a new generation of uncorrupted leaders that have the capacity to motivate citizens.
I see things a bit differently. The problem is our democracy has surrendered to money and power; and we’re on the precipice of a new world order that includes another Great Depression where corporations will be too big to jail or fail, so only us plebs will bear the brunt of what's coming. The solution includes a Constitutional Amendment to eradicate corporate personhood, end the equation of money with speech, and prohibit monetary contributions to federal candidates by corporations and nationally charted banks. In other words, we need to permanently set in stone a more elaborate version of the 1907 Tillman Act, designed in a way that the Supreme Court can’t ruin again.