Above all – as in his appraisal of Obama and Hillary – Nader doesn’t talk like a spinmeister for his political team. With the post-2000 polarisation of the country and Bush Derangement Syndrome, more and more people – ordinary people, not paid campaign politicos – now conduct ordinary conversations about politics as though they were lawyers pushily trying to spin a jury for their political side. Unlike such lay people (especially Democrats, I think) who now seem to do this as a matter of course, Nader really is more or less a professional politician. But he talks like a human being, and seems to say what he really thinks. More power to him.
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Unlike such lay people (especially Democrats, I think) who now seem to do this as a matter of course,…
Prior to the internet most serious political debate occurred between elites who had monopoly access to the physical mechanism of mass communications. Everyone else mostly just went along for the ride. Now days, ordinary people find themselves in the thick of political debates with people who hold widely divergent views from their own. People feel obligated to defend their choices using any means possible.
Frankly, I think this better even if it is uglier. Freedom is often ugly because it is unpredictable and we intuitive value predictability.
I don’t know. A lot of what passes for debate now is really verbal fighting, which is not the same thing. In the old days elites blocked access to information. Now individuals attempt to do the same thing or, more frequently, engage in verbal DOS attacks against their interlocutors that make rational discussion impossible.