Irony among ironies: the web is enabling a more participatory democracy that Founders like Alexander Hamilton feared. Today, we all have TV- or web-fueled opinions on topics that in a print-based era would have seemed obscure and arcane (please, how many of us understand the bond ratings, debt-to-GDP ratios and international economic machinations that comprise the national debt; but we all have our opinions, don't we?). The ignorant and telegenic Sarah Palin's every utterance is adoringly captured and disseminated. She makes no sense, but TV loves her smile and the web gorges on her moronic bowls of verbal soup. (Rand Paul transcripts read like those of her illegitimate offspring.)
"We The Rabble" now have dominant information media that, unlike the word, we're wholly comfortable with and so control. With secret prisons, torture, a President with the right to assassinate American citizens with no due process of any kind, and diminishing realms in which to rationally discuss them (versus emotionally react to them), the results are looking as dangerous as Hamilton feared.
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