> What the Dems do and what their base voters want them to do are often very
> different things. Dem voters are far more likely than Reps to favor social
> programs, oppose foreign wars, support civil rights for ethnic and sexual
> minorities, etc. Haven't you ever read an opinion poll?
I try not to, as they hurt me, but yes, I have. I think I've even understood a few of them.
But what Dem voters whisper in the ears of pollsters, or what Kos righteously writes on his blog, coexists with their voting for politicians who proudly slash government programs and openly expand foreign wars and with their employing and hyperexploiting of ethnic and sexual minorities. Now before you get offended at my intimating that you don't know this: my point isn't to enlighten you; I know you know this. The point is, to put it in psychological terms you might like, there is a sense in which they hold these opinions and proudly aver these beliefs because that allows them to then vote for politicians who do just the opposite. They get to have the politics they want but maintain a self-image that contrasts with those politics. I would put it in different terms: Their actual actions and movement reveal and enact a certain politics, and that's what we should be concerned with, not their self-image or what they reveal to a pollster. Who cares what they believe. (Seth, this, to me, is actually dealing with the world, or whatever anti-intellectual pejorative you used: reckoning how people move and act, not with the picture they have inside their heads.) Opinions mean nothing.
The relevant "two very different things" are not Dems and their base but, as Gaddis put it, believing and shitting.