"This is the question that intrigues me: How far are we willing to stretch our inclusion, our embrace of difference? Do we allow only certain categories of difference, or are we willing to go all the way, to embrace our ideological opposites? I turn again and again to William Blake and his idea of spiritual warfare waged against giant systems of thought -- spiritual warfare waged in a spirit of engagement and love."

Damn. I didn't know you had it in you, Cary. These are the kind of thoughts you meet at the tops of mountains. These are definitely the questions that should follow every indulgence of the infotainment that passes for political discourse these days. These are questions that, if pursued earnestly, I think will take us passed the confines of liberal democracy.

It hints at the ideological forced-choice, as Slavoj Zizek puts it, we live with in late Capitalism. Of course, we say with liberal smugness, we respect everybody's views, so long as they don't dirty up our vision of liberal democratic inclusiveness. Of course, we want people to have universal healthcare, which is why we're going to force them to buy health-insurance. Of course, we would love to have a radical voice like Kucinich or Edwards in office, but Mammon-bless, we simply have no choice but to vote for the neoliberal candidates---it's realistic.

Can there be freedom without constraint, inclusion without exclusion, social harmony without antagonism? Those who want to favor one extreme over another only hide what they avoid, and thereby deploy it with even more pernicious stealth. The greatest ideological critique we can engage in today is to take the kind of person the LW is talking about seriously, not for the sake of somehow being convinced by their overt-claims, but because when we reduce them to their overt-claims their implicit ones become all the more visible in all their contradictoriness. If truth, be it religious or scientific, requires that we fight for it, rather than being abiding in-itself, then it can't be worth all that much.

About 10% of everything I have ever bought---save for food, underwear and some electronics---has been new. I don't live in a world of brands, so I don't seem them as particularly relevant. I don't know about the people who do, who do buy basically everything new, but I see a more important difference here: it's not what you consume but how/why you consume. I see bigger differences between people on the way they relate to consumption PERIOD, and not the masochism of minor details this article elaborates. The more earth-shattering difference is not between who buys Gap and who buys American Eagle, or who buys Pabst or Budlight, but who buys from Good-Will (and others) and who pays outrageous mark-up on the essentially disposable.

"And in truth, the condition that Shenkman seems to be anatomizing is not so much stupidity as malleability."

Alright, so the herd isn't a herd of vegetables; it's still a herd.

"...the decisions we make about candidates can't help being informed by all the things that Shenkman distrusts: emotions, hopes, values."

Emotions, hopes and values are fine informants about what is worth doing and not doing in the world. They are still lousy administrators of action. The problem with most people is that what they value, what feels good is not bearing the responsibility of being the most basic agents of their government. These are bad values. Why should The People be allowed to govern themselves when they time and time again show how unseriously they take it?

I bet Shenkman doesn't take into account the controlling factor of economics though. For a long time, The People simply haven't been able to afford to be good at their civic roles. I don't mean just in the sense of cost of education. I mean that it is in the interest of Big Business, who employees most of the common-people, that The People are not only ill-equipped to think for and govern themselves, but that it actually leaves a bad taste in their mouth. It's in someone else's interest that The People do their job poorly.

The People live with the threat of a cognitive dissonance of unspoken magnitude: they are responsible for their own domination and exploitation. This is why you get anarchist and otherwise small-government types who pit themselves against the State as if it weren't an extension of themselves. It's easier to fight an enemy when it is not yourself. Unfortunately, The People are their own worst enemy, not a secret society of elites. If anything, it's the elites who keep everything from falling to shit.

The way we vote has a way of favoring uninformed voting. First-past-the-pole voting is quickly and probably always reducible to a two-party system. People can get as informed as they want, but in the end it will matter if they make the "right" choice, which is to say between the two parties. It's what some political theorists have taken to calling a forced-choice---kind of like "your money or your life," where of course you have a choice, but only one of them is the right one. You can't completely blame them either; voting that way is the only way to get something resembling a majority in the system as it is. It doesn't have to be that way though.

Instant Runoff Voting or some condorcet method would go a long way to making it possible for an informed electorate to think for itself, and not how their neighbor or the mainstream-media tell them to think. Why should opinion polls matter, when in the voting booth its your opinion that counts? I mean, what kind of fucking so-called democracy do we live in when "can't win" is a good reason to vote for someone? The first-past-the-pole voting system means that people informed votes are thrown away if not made "correctly." There is nothing democratic about this in the first place.

You must be talking about another article, because "affordable healthcare" is not "universal healthcare."