"What people want"?

[Carl Remick]

Anyone else happen to see the review of  Thomas Geoghegan's The Secret
Lives of Citizens: Pursuing the Promise of American Life in last week's
New York Observer?  Depressing.  Sample follows: 
"Mr. Geoghegan believes that in a properly operating democracy working
people and their sympathizers would vote for better wages. This seems
wrong as theory and wrong as a description of what people, even working
people, want. They apparently want freedom, even at terrible social
cost, even at their own expense."

You can find the full text, in all its patronizing bleakness, at
http://www.observer.com/cgi-win/homepage.exe?nyo1/bl021599

Carl Remick