'Michael, you devoted a few hundred words to a critique of how many/most Americans think and act. Then you say we should write as one of them. But you don't make membership in the group seem very attractive. Though this may sound blunt, I ask this with a great deal of admiration for what you do: how are you one of them? '
Is this not a familiar problem, I mean philosophically, at least. It is the similar to the approach Marx and Engels lay out in the Manifesto where they talk about the relation of communists and proletarians. Roughly the point is that they are not separate from the proletariat, but that 'In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, they always and everywhere represent the interests of the movement as a whole'.
The same question is in Hegel's different stages of thought, where he distinguishes between natural thought and scientific though. He insists that they are substantially the same, but that scientific thought is a distillation of the essential meaning that remains intuitive in natural thinking. Or it is comparable to Rousseau's distinction between the General Will, and the many disparate wills of the mass.
It is not possible to 'represent the interests of the movement as a whole' without abstracting oneself from the spontaneous consciousness of the mass, which remains mired in partial and one-sided preoccupations. So to get to the heart of the thing, in the first instance you have to take a step away from it.
Elitist thought (like Nietzsche, say, or Kierkegaard) fetishises the initial step away from existing consciousness, assuming that the mass is hopelessly lost to illusions, losing sight of the fact that its own thought is only a distillation of that consciousness, higher in form, but not substantially diffferent. Those solipsists made a virtue of their separation from the mass, and wandered in splendid isolation, beautiful souls, their ideals to perfect to be realised and therefore corrupted in the mundane world.
The important thing is not to lose sight of the fact that if socialism is anything it is the subordination of social production to the democratic control of the mass. It certainly implies a transformation of the masses in their outlook. But without the masses, what is it but a lot of smug platitudes coined to make you feel superior.