More political, more personal

Mary Ratliff at Pacific Views offers a thoughtful follow-up to "The Political and the Personal" that decidedly contributes to the conversation:

Throwing Gasoline on the Fire

Being challenged in your beliefs and your approaches is one of the best ways to understand the inherent problems with your approach and to find ways to improve your policies and your ideas. We really do do better if we have honest challenges that forces us to examine our ideas and our solutions. In a real democracy where everyone is heard and considered before coming to a consensus, all the stakeholders in the community build the policy with which they all can live with and support. This was the magic of the representative democracy our forefathers wanted to create, and now the tactics of the Republicans are destroying our ability to make it work because it requires trust.

Yet without some basic sense that the other side will treat you decently, the concept of turning power over to the other is inconceivable especially if you believe the other side's goal is to smash you.

Discourse.net also makes a substantial contribution:

I do think that the impact of what is sometimes called the Mighty Wurlitzer - the vast echo-chamber of the right-wing propaganda machine - remains under appreciated. (The appropriation of the term Might Wurlitzer for this is somewhat unfortunate, as it originally denoted a CIA-funded plot to hire journalists and salt their work. There is absolutely no evidence that I’m aware of suggesting that the modern equivalent of the five-minute hate campaign is funded or directed by a government agency.) Whether the modern, private, propaganda machine is self-organized, or more centrally funded and directed, is less important than the legal regime that protects and enables it and which it in turn reinforces: media concentration, abandonment of requirements that holders of valuable monopolies on public airwaves make an attempt at balance, and a reality (with many causes) in which Clinton was savaged even worse than he deserved, and candidates like Bush and Schwarzenegger can say blatantly false things and only the blogs seem to care.

Both are well worth reading in full, of course.