Booman Tribune ~ Comments ~ Lippmann, Strauss, and Public Opinion

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"Explosive" State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration
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The book the CIA doesn't want you to read: Jawbreaker: The Attack on Bin Laden and Al Qaeda: A Personal Account by the CIA's Key Field Commander
Larry Johnson's review

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Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women's History (Third Edition)

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Lippmann, Strauss, and Public Opinion | 18 comments (18 topical, editorial, 0 hidden)

Re: Lippmann, Strauss, and Public Opinion (none / 0)

Edmund Burke was an intellectual and he has his heirs. The thing to remember is that genuine right-wing intellectuals are not small d democrats. They almost all subscribe to various schools of manufacturing consent. And that is not a bankrupt school of thought. Elitist, yes. But deeply pragmatic as well.

by BooMan on Sun Feb 25th, 2007 at 04:40:43 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Lippmann, Strauss, and Public Opinion (none / 0)

Doesn't "We, the people" imply small-d democracy? So doesn't an American heir to Burke have to take the position that the founding fathers didn't understand what they were doing? I don't idealize the Founding, but even I find that position untenable.

Also, I think that there's lots of empirical evidence that participatory, as opposed to formal, democracy works. And American elites have had to go through a great deal of effort to stifle American democracy: creating PR machinery, setting up public education so that it discourages thought as opposed to cultivating it, privatizing the airwaves, etc.

That, combined with the fact that the whole evolution of politics in the West appears to have been toward democracy, would indicate that schools of manufacturing consent are indeed bankrupt.

But then, what has been happening to Democracy here might not be unique to America. I have been meaning to read the following article: Ruling the Void. Perhaps now is a good time for me to do it, to see if it leads me to reassess my views on these matters. Here is the abstract:

The Hollowing of Western Democracy
`A semi-sovereign people' was the term coined nearly half a century ago to suggest that control over political decision-making might lie beyond the reach of the ordinary citizen. Schattschneider's thesis was a familiar theme in the sixties, discussed by a variety of critical scholars in the so-called pluralist-elitist debate. It seems to me to remain highly relevant--albeit now in a stronger and less equivocal form. For today even semi-sovereignty appears to be slipping away, and the citizenry are becoming effectively non-sovereign. What we see emerging is a notion of democracy that is being steadily stripped of its popular component--democracy without a demos. In what follows I examine the twin processes of popular and elite withdrawal from mass electoral politics with particular focus on the transformation of political parties. I conclude with a discussion of the implications of this process for Western liberal democracies.

Republicans are like fetuses: both are incapable of thought. That's why Republicans are against abortion.

by Alexander on Sun Feb 25th, 2007 at 05:13:23 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Lippmann, Strauss, and Public Opinion (none / 0)

There is idealism and then there is reality.

The powerful will always wield power. It's a tautology, but no less true for being so.

For the powerful, Democracy is okay as a corrective, but not as a means of setting policy. In other words, none of us are qualified to decide, for example, that it is in our national security interests to invade Panama and oust Noriega. That's not our role.

But if that invasion goes incredibly wrong, it is oue role to oust the people that advocated it and put new people in power.

This is how real power politics works and has always worked, platitudes to the people notwithstanding.

This is what we are seeing happen now, along with the uncovering of the mechanisms of consent manufacture that the Libby trial and other things have exposed.

The DLC and TNR are now in damage control as THE PEOPLE have seen too much of the other side of the log...so to speak.

But that doesn't mean that we are headed to a future where non-elites set foreign policy. They always do and always will. The idea is to make it harder for them to move us in areas that make no sense.

Power is power. If you want to have a voice, you need some.

by BooMan on Sun Feb 25th, 2007 at 05:26:50 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Lippmann, Strauss, and Public Opinion (none / 0)

Well put.

I find it revealing that when I heard Richard Posner speak at a conference he said almost exactly the same thing. He said that the people are not interested in public policy; they are more interested in following things like following baseball. (That part didn't get into the published text.) We do not have a participatory democracy. (I forget what he called the one we do have.) Basically, the only say the people have is to "get the bastards out" if they screw up sufficiently badly. (Unsurprisingly, the example he used of the bastards that needed getting out were Clinton/Gore, not Bush 1.)

Republicans are like fetuses: both are incapable of thought. That's why Republicans are against abortion.

by Alexander on Sun Feb 25th, 2007 at 05:55:16 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Lippmann, Strauss, and Public Opinion (none / 0)

This is why I am impatient with those that are suspicious of people that seek power. What the hell are we doing if we don't seek power? As if we could exert power without it?

We can exert power in the interests of the people without health care or we can let these assholes continue to exert power.

I am not your enemy and neither is Chris Bowers. However, people that tell us that we are wasting our time are your enemies.

Know your enemies seems to be the advice for the day.

If you want to disengage from power then you should be clear that power will continue to screw you.

by BooMan on Sun Feb 25th, 2007 at 06:23:47 PM EST
[ Parent ]

I agree completely! n/t (none / 0)

Republicans are like fetuses: both are incapable of thought. That's why Republicans are against abortion.

by Alexander on Sun Feb 25th, 2007 at 06:56:51 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Lippmann, Strauss, and Public Opinion | 18 comments (18 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)

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