> I beg to disagree strongly. People like *us* -- sharp as a tack,
> intellectually top-notch -- think it's crap, but we are a tiny minority
> of the public. In general, Americans vote on the basis of character
> because they think they are electing *people,* who have characters, and
> not walking, talking "issues," which are abstract theoretical
> propositions without character. And because they feel that they are
> competent judges of character, but can't understand "issues."
>
> This is precisely why we intellectual leftists will probably *never* be
> any good at politics. Our approach is diametrically opposed to the
> approach 98% of the population uses, and until we understand that we
> will be totally impotent!
>
> Minimum wage is a very simple issue to understand, so it is one of the
> exceptional issues that people will vote for. In fact, it's rather
> surprising to me that it's not popular in more places than Nevada and
> Florida.
>
>
Understanding the basis on which the majority of people make political decisions doesn't make that basis any less crappy. First, politics are not about character, but about what politicians do. Second, the just-folks character that Bush projects is fake, and not that hard to see through. There's simply no getting around the fact that the majority of Americans are ignorant and deluded about politics in a way that inhabitants of just about all other developed countries, and many less developed ones, aren't. This country is a huge counter-example to the historical materialist argument that advanced material conditions make for advanced people. We should understand this reality without making excuses for it. -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20041105/1124ab96/attachment.htm>