This was a response to a particular individual on this site. However, this applies to all people who take a condescending view of the "common man." Cynicism and the underestimation of the average person may be the reason why liberals have so much trouble relating their message to these people. It is also because most liberals that are part of the establishment have a very similar agenda to the conservatives and they really only feign dissent - thereby setting the boundaries for "reasonable dissent." This is all antithetical to the higher ideals of democracy or republicanism, but it continues almost unabated because of the fallacies that develop from the cynical worldview that holds that Republicans are simply better at appealing to the "lowest common denominator."
Americans are smarter than you think - why cynicism is the tool of oppression
By: Nathan Jaco
You seem to have a very cynical and incorrect way of looking at things. It is true that all people are emotional to varying degrees and that all people are frightened from time to time.
However, I think it is incorrect to call people in America as an aggregate innumerate and looking for a man on the white horse. It is this kind of condescending view that may be responsible for the inability of the Democrats to appeal to people.
Human beings are intelligent, that is a characteristic of the human animal. Sure, we have varying degrees of specialization, and some suffer from psychological disorders, but for the most part there are rational sensibilities in a person to which one can appeal.
Furthermore, current policies like military system proliferation, intensification of conflict and international aggressiveness, full spectrum or counterinsurgency operations, and the rollbacks in the funding of critical social programs are the historical policies of both the Democratic and the Republican party.
You are working under what I believe is a false presupposition, that the Reps are the bad guys and the Dems are the good guys who are working toward opposite goals. When in fact, most liberal media outlets and liberal intellectuals only feign dissent.
In the public domain, one can question whether or not the War in Iraq or things that happen there are wise tactical decisions, but one cannot question in a systematic fashion whether or not the US has a right to exploit the materiel and manual resources of other nations.
The problem with the current state of affairs is that you have high-level planners from two different parties who have similar objectives and similar methodologies for achieving those objectives. There is also an excellent propaganda system in place to obfuscate the policy differential. This leaves people confused, but it is not because they are incapable of understanding the policies.
Actually, the policies are quite simple. As covertly as possible use institutional violence, force, and coercion to create an investor-friendly business climate abroad and exploit the resources of other countries by appealing to the corruption in their public officials or, failing that, aggressive regime change. To get away with this in a legal context and to keep the citizenry off the trail, employ "Free Trade Agreements" and convince people that investor-friendly exploitative globalization is a natural and healthy process which should be understood and helped along. These were essentially the policies of Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and now Bush II, with some surprisingly slight variations, mostly on the domestic front, particularly in the cases of Carter and Clinton.
When you offer people a choice between two evils and say, in an almost sickly overt manner, that they have to pick what they feel is the lesser of two evils, then people will become antipathetic, but that should not be construed as apathy or complacency. The myth of apathy is one that assists the neoliberals in getting away with their actions toward a proto-fascist world system through the privatization of public resources and the emergence of an all-encompassing command economy.
The fact of the matter is, people are not uneducated or undereducated about social science, they are intentionally miseducated. For example, my Accouting 200 book proliferates positive views of corporate mercantilism. There are even advertisements for McDonald's in the book. Economics classes at American universities teach very little if any comparative economics, it is all corporate mercantilism or state capitalism.
The reason this system is so widespread, is because the world has three superpowers: the US, Russia, and China, all state capitalists and they all work together to squelch independent nationalism from developing anywhere in the world. And they are largely successful, except in the Islamic world.