it's equally possible that such campaigns are undertaken on the part of people who feel they know what's best for everyone else. any social theory or folk social theory follows plato's model insofar as the person trying to explain to herself and others what is wrong with the world must explain why it is that the majority of the people in the world just don't "get it". they must explain why they seem to prefer to watch the shadows dancing on the cave wall rather than turning to see the light, as the enlightenerati have apparently already done.
the multitude, the masses, the working class, whatever...they are sheeple for the libertarians. they are the falsely conscious for the marxists. they will never be capable of moving beyond the trade unionist mentality for the leninists. they are ignorant subjectivities for the post-marxists. for contemporary some contemporary leftists, it's just that they're inbreds. it's a genetic thang ya see. such an attitude renders so-called radical leftists, in some sense, hopelessly conservative for even an enlightenment liberals like jefferson thought that it was a problem that could be fixed by education and technology:
"The generation which commences a revolution can rarely complete it. Habituated from their infancy to passive submission of body and mind to their kings and priests...their experience, their ignorance and bigotry make them instruments in the hands of the Bonapartes and Iturbides, to defeat their own rights and purposes. This is the present situation in Europe and Spanish America. But it is not desperate. The light which has been shed on mankind by the art of printing has eminently changed the condition of the world..It continues to spread..."
--Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to John Adams (1823)
the "what is to be done" question always involves explaining this "problem" and conceiving of and engaging in various forms of political praxis designed to "solve" this "problem".
so, i suspect that, given ObL Inc's tendency toward an elitist form of folk social explanation, i don't imagine ObL gives a shit what the people might say they need or want.
like some marxists on this list, that would be irrelevant.
oh, i suppose you want me to name names. okey doke: you and yoshie have argued several times that, although single parents raising children might like the state to go after their deadbeats fathers and mothers so that they can give their kids a better life here and now, they are misguided because such a policy, in the long run, does not and will not lead to that groovy utopia where childrearing will be socialized or whatever the hell you guys envision in the b.f. skinner baby/child factory model i think LNP3.EXE has talked about on the marxism list.
aaaahhh, well, to be fair, i should point out that all of us have articulated this vision: what people actually want isn't what's always good for them. i guess i'd say that the "ultras" here on the list take it to the extreme in an extremely arrogant way.
kelley