Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> National Journal - September 2, 2004
>
> 09-02-2004
>
> Media - Bird Brains
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> By William Powers (E-mail this author)
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> © National Journal Group, Inc.
>
> The media's job is to report on the world in all its complexity, but
> that's not what we do most of the time. What we do is take a complex
> story like this presidential race and reduce it to a series of
> simplistic narratives, cartoonish character studies, and thought
> packages that don't look like reality, yet wind up becoming it.
There is an interesting essay in the Aug. 30 _New Yorker_, Louis Menand, "The Unpolitical Animal: How political science understands voters." I'm not sure if I have any particular response to it myself, but it does at least suggest that the kind of political analysis and debate that occurs on this list (or in the NYT for that matter) does not have much relevance to elections. The thrust of the article, as I understand it from a casual skim, is that voters do not have the remotest idea of what it is they are voting for or against. I'd be interested in comments from others either on Menand's article or on the books it references.
But assuming for a moment the rough accuracy of the article, I would say that while it would negate all political theories grounded in the well-informed (abstract) individual of bourgeois democracy, it does not touch at all the essential accuracy of Mao's "Trust the People." The people, in the sense of that slogan, exist only as participants in collective action and discussion, not as isolated individuals (or households) making up their own minds. Over a year ago I started reading but never finished two books that might illuminate the tangle here, Robin Osborne, _Demos: The Discovery of Classical Attika_, and Martin Ostwald, _Nomos and the Beginnings of Athenian Democracy_. Perhaps if I can get some energy back (by somehow resolving the contradiction of intestinal bleeding and the need to take anti-coagulants), I can get back to those books. One difficulty for the non-scholar is that books are written for fellow- greek historians -- i.e., they often don't bother to translate the quotations from ancient greek sources.
Anyhow, indulging in a bit of hyperbole to be perhaps later qualified and developed, what Justin calls liberal proceduralism depends on two contrary-to-fact premises: That the people will always (operating in isolation) follow the recommendations of a governing elite and That that elite will always, more or less, try to serve the general interest, general interest not being defined in contradiction to the interests of the bulk of the working population, at home and abroad.
Mao's slogan does not work in civil society. It only works in a movement grounded in a modern equivalent of the Athenian deme.
Carrol