The poverty of political debate.

My argument was that the mainstream understanding of political corruption got things upside down. Rather than the prevalence of corruption making people cynical about politics, the inability of politics to project a positive image fuelled an obsession with corruption. Whereas politics once centred on competing visions of how to organise society, today it has become a dull technical affair. Although there are often heated debates these tend to focus on narrow technical questions or schemes for regulating personal behaviour.

In fact, in the proper sense of the term, politics does not exist at present. The public has been sidelined from any discussion of how to organise society. People are treated as customers of state services or consumers of goods rather than active citizens who are capable of shaping their own future. Although the formal institutions of democracy still exist in America they are an empty shell without the active engagement of citizens in debates on big ideas.

Mr. Ben-Ami's conclusion is accurate.

If one reflects on the dishonesty of the "Bush lied, people died" canard or the recent prominence given to Cindy Sheehan's eructations, can one conclude that principled debate today has a priority much above good AM radio reception?

The Dems rushed to avoid political responsibility for their support of Mr. Bush in the run up to the Iraq war, as though every man and his dog before the war began were not convinced that "Saddam Hussein" and "WMD" were as closely linked in the actual world as are "Jesse Jackson" and "shakedown."

This pre-war support was unnoticeable?

"It’s cynicism that is corrupting politics." Daniel Ben-Ami, Spiked, 6/23/06 (footnotes omitted).