This is a really good article...a must read for all who favor are election system
Barack Obama: The Bourgeois Moralist by max blunt at 02:56PM (CEST) on April 13, 2007
In his 1999 book on Bill and Hillary Clinton, No One Left to Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family (New York: Verso, 1999), the then still Leftish Christopher Hitchens wrote something interesting about the “the essence of American politics:
This essence, consists of the manipulation of populism by elitism.
That elite is most successful which can claim the heartiest allegiance of the fickle crowd.
That can present itself as ‘in touch’ with popular concerns.
That can anticipate the tides and pulses of opinion.
That can, in short, be the least apparently elitist.
Barack Obama’s Noxious Populism
Barack Obama asks: ‘How can we engage more people in the democratic process?
Whatever its actual intent, the centrist Obama’s question was objectively democratic and populist in wording: how might a greater share of the U.S. citizenry be encouraged to participate in ostensibly popular governance?
“Well,” I said to my populist self upon reading Obama's query, “we could start by reducing the insanely expensive nature of our election extravaganzas and by abolishing the private funding of public elections.
"The way it is now, with candidates relying heavily on big money private contributions to pay for ostensibly public, astronomically expensive media- and consultant-driven campaigns, many ordinary U.S. citizens probably figure they can’t possibly compete for meaningful influence.
"It’s pretty questionable whether we really have a ‘democratic process’ given the undue power of concentrated wealth in a nation where the top 1 percent owns more than a third of the wealth and a larger share of the politicians.
"Ordinary working class people know this and they disengage. It’s not rocket science.” LINK
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