roachboy

regarding elitism: political life in an actual democracy would be about argument--it would be about laying out your position and the critique of alternative possibilities--because much would be at stake in the taking of a decision, there would be an expectation that all positions be able to articulate themselves clearly.

if you read plato--who hated athenian democracy btw---you can see one of the consequences of democracy----there would be a problem with arguments that appealed too directly to the emotions, with arguments that employed obviously false logic, because they could persuade the polis to act on faulty grounds.
and if the polis acted in error, on false grounds, there was no-one to save them from the consequences of their actions.

conflict--debate--is eminently democratic. it is a conflictual system. of course the americans do not have a democracy and probably would not want one, though their reactionary leaders these days like to talk about democracy.

so, art: if i understand your position as leading to an inability to think about the material effects of government actions, say, or that your tendency to short out argument by making political moves into the result of a series of (arbitrary) subjective attributes, and i react by countering with an alternative viewpoint (the premises of which i try to lay out--whether i manage it or not is another question) there is nothing elistist about it. if the langauge fails to persuade, then fine....

i do not think it outrageous or elitist to point out that the logical consequences of conservative ideology is the dissolving of social problems--well the social tout court. i do not think there is anything elitist about arguing that the only way you could really "trust the government"--particularly now in the midst of the political and intellectual squalor that is bushworld---is to ignore or arbitrarily limit the meaning of the words you use (still no definitions, e.g. as a way to normalize bushworld by flattening into an ill-defined continuum of "history"), to reduce your vision of the exisiting political order to purely formal properties (the first long post tried to argue this), and to assume that your particular experience is somehow a paradigm for thinking about the situation endured by all actors within this society. yours is a position that is almost inconceivable without some religious linking term.

and it is historically false to think that the formal mechanisms of governance worked out by the americans have been or are capable of operating coherently without feedback loops--and those loops are provided by conflict. hell. you can look at the development of almost anything, from elements of the state apparatus to the design of basic consumer goods, and find that the result you enjoy today is the result of intense social conflict condensed around particular spaces/questions.

there is another problem, however, art: what i think you are really arguing around is the question of what to do with real dissent in a direct-democratic situation after a decision has been taken. if you shifted your position to here, it would at least be clearer----personally, i think the notion that once a decision has been taken, the minority should submit to the majority---one outlined in tocqueville's "democracy in america"---is wrong, in that it assures incoherence precisely through the elimination of feedback. but it seems to me that this is the core of your argument--it rests on an illusion (to my mind) of proper democratic procedure, the legitimacy of a particular outcome (that bush actually won the last election, say [although this is far far from the only reason to oppose him], and that therefore bush represents in some meaningful way represents the [really problematic fiction of a] "general will") and that therefore those in opposition should just shut up because they already had their chance to debate (obviously absurd) and lost and further that they should not worry about having to shut up because everything works itself out in the end.

to paraphrase (because i dont trust my memory) public enemy (and by doing that align myself with the older folk in the grand scheme of hip hop history outlined in "ghost dog):

"dont worry be happy" was a number one jam/
damn if i say that, you can slap me right here.....

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite