The ruling elite's line that politics today is "too polarized" is self-serving bunkum. Politics is not nearly polarized enough! The two parties are really divisions of a single statist uniparty. There is no prominent anti-statist party that is taken seriously by the mass media, which is little more than the PR department of the uniparty system. Internecine contests over who holds power is not true polarization, since the two sides do not represent the poles of any fundamental controversy.
Let's trade faux polarization, which only serves the interests of power, for the real McCoy.
Thursday, January 13, 2011
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2 comments:
If only that were true, Mr. Richman. So long as the average man can vote, then we are subject to the average man's discretion.
So often in politics we are fighting an uphill battle against the victory of form over substance. If politicians do disastrous things, that is OK, as long as the pundits and citizens all mind their p's and q's.
Glenn Greenwald has some relevant insights here in a recent post, when discussing why Brookings scholar Benjamin Wittes won't engage him after his alleged lack of civility in his critiques of Wittes' "centrism":
" ... Bill Kristol and John Yoo are both extremely "civil" in the sense that Wittes means this -- all while they advocate indecent and repellent ideas. That, by itself, demonstrates the irrelevance of these vapid notions of "civility" to which Wittes and most DC denizens cling as a means of justifying what they're actually advocating (we may be defending repulsive and destructive ideas -- we're cheering on wars and insisting on legal immunity for torturers -- but at least we're doing it in a soft-spoken manner while sitting in plush think tank conference rooms with name plates and pitchers of water, which entitles us to respect and deference).
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