WELL: Sorry for my troglodyte ways as of late; beginning of the semester, the need to put a new system on my computer, and my need to revisit with some degree of comprehensiveness American political behavior as a field*. More sometime in the future.
*I've come to the conclusion that Americans are racist, bigoted crypt**-fascists***, and that the only hope they have of not being that bad is if it's the case that they're just too ignorant of political matters for those positions to be meaningful. Anyone who can point me to something that contradicts this general trend and can thus restore my faith in democracy is more than welcome to do so.
**Obviously, I meant "crypto-fascist." I have no idea what a "crypt-fascist" would be (people who hold their political rallies in cemetaries? The official political party of vampires?)
***Actually, upon further reflection, I've come across an interesting line of thought in the survey response/political knowledgability literature which suggests both that some of the negative conclusions in Campbell et al, Converse and that school of thought**** are artefacts of the weirdness of trying to map peoples' political attitudes using survey questions, as well as the confusedness of peoples' political orientation (which does not equate to their being ignorant or uninformed about policy questions, just that they are beseiged by a rather large number of considerations). Also, my brief conclusion from my time with tolerance literature is that the very additions which make it a more empirically accurate measure make it a normatively meaningless concept, about which more later (perhaps).
****Sometimes known as the "Michigan School," but I'm trying to protect my alma mater by casually slandering them in a meta-footnote rather than in the actual text of a post itself.
"Thou shalt not extinguish thine anger, but shall master it,
that thy conscience may not be blunted by adjustment
to wrong causes."
-The Dutch Ten Commandments to Foil the Nazis
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