Doug Henwood wrote:
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> As Eric said, and I agree - stupidity is produced. But I really think we need to know more about the demographics of this belief before we start getting carried away with sophisticated explanation. This delusion could overlap substantially with the Tea Partiers, who are mostly better-off white reactionaries.
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I have no quarrel with that. We do indeed. What I'm trying somewhat sloppily to get at is that current capitalism is capable as it were of seriously confusing (stulitfying) even the "more fortunate" demographic sectors. As Jim Devine once suggested I believe, Economics Departments are organized crime -- but I also suspect that the bulk of economists 'outside' the prestige departments sincerely believe the nonsense they've imbibed in grad school. And the generating 'mechanisms' of that stultifying effect are (a) the radical individuating features of a fully developed capitalist 'economy,' which extend throughout the whole of capitalist society, and (2) the nearly complete divorce of act and motive. The isolated individual, then, having _no_ direct experience (which is impossible) of the social relations generated by the capitalist economy and little or no training in abstraction (or in recognizing the difference between an abstraction and a mere empirical generalization, is nearly helpless to resist nonsense explanations of what is happening.(Usually, those accounts 'explain' large social events and relations in terms of simple generalization from 'ordinary' experience (e.g., household budgets or 'saving' cash for future expenditures).
As I said, my efforts so far are pretty sloppy, but I think they point to the direction explanation should explore. You are probably roughly right in your guess at the demographic spread on any topic, but the same social forces will be operating at all 'levels,' even if in different ways.
Carrol