> Defining Conservatism Down
>
> As the Right’s popularity has grown,
> its intellectual challenge to the
> Left has diminished.
>
> by Austin Bramwell
http://www.amconmag.com/2005/2005_08_29/cover.html
> In his 1922 classic, Public Opinion, Walter Lippmann argued
> that ordinary people lacked the intellectual resources
> necessary for even the feeblest grasp of modern complexities.
> A piqued John Dewey then responded with The Public and Its
> Problems, billed as a refutation of Lippmann. It turns out,
> however, that Dewey conceded nearly all of Lippmann’s points.
> The best he could contribute was the vague hope that with
> sufficient education, the people might eventually become
> capable of democratic government. Though Dewey’s mind
> macerated in vacuous abstractions such as “democracy” and
> “experience,” in the end his views differed little from
> Lippmann’s: in Deweyan as in Lippmannian democracy, elite
> social scientists should rule.
Yet the explicit continuation of that debate defines much of Noam Chomsky's politics -- against the rule of "elite social scientists".
Anyone more familiar with Dewey have anything to say on this point??
-- Shane