On Jan 15, 2007, at 11:07 AM, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>> Yes, it's true, but what's so good about the people's ideas?
>
> The people are politically significant in two senses: abstract and
> concrete. It's the "people" in the abstract who have sovereignty in
> the modern imagination about democracy; and it's the best organized
> faction (of multiple classes and strata) of the "people," led by
> intellectuals (who used to come exclusively from bourgeois or
> petit-bourgeois backgrounds but some of whom may now come from humbler
> class backgrounds, given mass education) whose ideas are rooted in the
> national and (increasingly) regional popular culture, who make social
> revolutions in the concrete. If ideas of intellectuals are not rooted
> in the people's ideas, they are incapable of organizing any sizable
> faction of the people, let alone making the faction they lead prevail.
This is all at a high level of abstraction. What good ideas do the American people - a large and almost unimaginably diverse group, I know, but I'm thinking of moderately educated people below the professional/managerial class - have that are so wonderful that left intellectuals fail to acknowledge?
There's an idea on the left that the really good stuff should percolate up from below, and the duty of intellectuals is to listen and learn from such but I really would love some concrete examples. You live in Columbus, Ohio, which is almost by definition the prototypical American city, so surely if it's out there, you've heard it.
Doug