I'm doing something that I've wanted to do for a while. It surprises me how difficult it is.
Put simply, I'm summarizing an article so that I can understand it. It's not a learned or scholarly article -- instead, its a relatively simple one from The New Yorker on pluralism -- the idea that effective actions in politics are taken in concert by multiple people, working together or independently. I've never understood on any but the most superficial level how politics works. I don't particularly care for the idea that it works by powerful people imposing their will, but I couldn't see how it would work any other way.
So, when I came across this article today, I thought I'm going to READ this, and do my best to understand it. Its not that its tough reading so much as that I've just lost the ability to read and understand anything but simple ideas. And so I printed it off, and now I'm going through it, highlighting key phrases. When I'm done, I will write myself a short summary of those key points.
I may not remember them tomorrow. But I will by god have tried.
1 comment:
Pluralism is how democracies work. All else devolves into dictatorships of one sort or another. The key to understanding political theory is to see if you can divorce it from econonmic theory.
Its hard to do, some would say impossible. But doing so helps to focus through the B.S. However, government by special interest and lobby groups has been going on for a long time. The alternative is totalitarianism.
OTOH, I dropped out of poly sci in my second year because I thought it was filled with elitist airheads that confused philosophy with reality. But then, maybe that was just the nature of people going through what I call "The Stupid Years", which seems to co-incide with most University, College, and Military terms of service. Hopefully the "backroom manipulators" are over that.
As a former military man, I believe that the best government one could have is one that will protect you from your enemies, support your friends, fund technologies, uphold the law, regulate issues relating to health (licencing hospitals, doctors, airlines and automobile drivers, inspecting meat, water and milk...) chase terrorists down, secure borders, uphold human rights and ensure literacy for all.
There are a lot of things I leave off that list....some on purpose. I once made a checklist of questions with which I measured the campaign promises against my "wish list", and decided that almost anything they said was so general, sweeping, and emotional as to be almost useless.
Right now, the medium IS the message....
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