beginning my response to mark smith's american business and political power for tomorrow, i thought of tony kushner's commencement address at vassar in 2002: "you are the citizen of a flawed but actual democracy," he said.
i went back to read the thing again and it is as good as it has always been, which is to say: really fucking good. so smart and inspiring!
and also, the perfect frame for my beef with smith, who manages to show (golly, what a surprise) that americans live in an actual democracy, then basically refuses to address the extent to which that democracy may be flawed. seriously: are there people out there who doubt that public opinion influences policy in the US? how is that an interesting thesis for a book? and would it not be more productive, not to mention more debatable, to investigate control of public opinon?
yeeeeeeesh.
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by day a political scientist! by night a significantly less intellectually responsible political scientist!
amelia.hoover@[university].edu
welcome to my blog. i'm a ph.d. candidate in political science at yale, a native midwesterner, and a happy californian. right now my research is about armed organizations and how they organize their violence against noncombatants, or fail to. i'm also interested in intentional community, gender in the academy, grad school pedagogy, fat politics, the religious left, my partner, our local farmers' market and idiosyncratic capitalization practices.