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poco-let me sum things up for you.
if you read the answers from other folk to the thread--if you read almost anyone talking about their "party afiiliation", you'll see something on the order of what i had said.
my argument is that the electorate seems to have worked out ways to split their votes across party lines, to distribute them variously---and i offered a hypothesis to explain it--that the splittining up of votes--some rep. some dem, some independent, some green, etc.---the disintegration of strict party allegiance is a mode of adapting to the increasing ocnvergence of the parties.
i also made a further hypothesis: that this adaptation can be seen as something on the order of a practical mode of denial of the convergence of the parties in the context of an increasingly reactionary and uniform ideological climate---that the splitting of votes can be understood as a way for folk to create the illusion of diversity of choice in a situation that offers then little. you could see the increasing reliance on cutlural conservative issues to polarize the electorate as a symptom of this.
to say anything about the situation, a individual perspective on this would not only be arbitrary, but would serve to legitimate the impression that busy work of voting across party lines etc. really does demonstrate a meaningful level of choice/autonomy. in other words, it would repeat the adapative mode by trying repeating it at a slightly higher level of abstraction.
i think that illusion of choice is nothing more than that.
i think that the illusion of choice repeated as pseudo-analysis is an ideological move, not an analytic one.
the focus on the individual in right ideology more generally has had the interesting effect (among oothers) of allowing systematic shifts to go unnoticed while the politics debate collapses down onto irrelevant "common-sense" level discourse about any number of issues---the focus on the individual at the expense of the social is a form of political self-immolation, it is auto-disempowerment disguised in the language of freedom.
what i am saying is that your theorem appears to be wrong.
do you have any aggregated data, to shape your collection of the anecdotal? cards on the table, sir....
as for who i would define as the ruling elite---well lets see, poco--take a look at how i talked about where i am coming from above, and see if you can derive what you think i will say. you set up a guessing game about you at the core of this thread--so now you get to play one. reciprocity is implicit in the notion of game. your turn.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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