On Tuesday, April 2, 2002, at 02:34 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
> Nathan Newman wrote:
>
>> But my main point, as usual, is that I think politics is far less of
>> the
>> centralized corporate duopoly envisioned by most leftists, and far
>> more a
>> system of 435 individual Congressional worlds.
>
> You may be right, but isn't this part of the idiotic genius of the
> American system? Complete fractionation, organizationally and
> ideologically, is a wonderful gift to the status quo.
i don't know. are those "435 individual congressional worlds" really so different from each other? isn't it a little bit like budweiser attempting to boast that they have 6 (or whatever puny number) "local" breweries around the country? i would venture that, given the scale, there really isn't all that much in the way of "local" difference in these "local" constituencies. now, if you wanted to say there were 1000 local congressional worlds and have that many congresspeople, you might be onto something. maybe. i think the red herring here is seeing that fractionation strictly geographically. if that kind of (geographical) fractionation is a gift to the status quo, isn't it a gift in the form of the *perception* of fractionation? the perception of how peoria is so much different from, what, nyc? even chicago?
none of these are rhetorical questions.
j