I have serious issues with Barr - I think he's by far the worst candidate the Libertarians have ever put up. He was a vehement social conservative while in Congress, and seems to have reversed course on all of that in order to step back into the spotlight as the Libertarian we are supposedly expected to believe he was all along. He was, in Congress, a major anti-drug figure, he voted for the Patriot Act and the Iraq War, he proposed banning practicing Wicca in the military, and was thoroughly pro-life. He's not a Libertarian by any meaningful measure
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Amen to your comments on anti-intellectualism. Though I wonder how much of the "climate" is based on actually public opinion and how much is based on perceived public opinion. Too bad ACTUAL public opinion is almost impossible to measure.
Well, I'd argue that public opinion exists in an intersubjective relationship with perceived public opinion (which is really just the public opinion about what the public opinion is). I think the more useful measurement than some sort of survey of public opinion here is one based on the power of particular ideologies. It's clear to me that anti-intellectualism is a powerful ideology at present. Whether its power is because it is widely held or held by a small group of important people, it is an ideology that dominates public discourse.
Option three it could just be perceived as widely held by those in power. And even though those in power don't particularly agree with it they go along with it because that is what they think the public wants. Then it isn't really held widely in the public or even just by the few and powerful. That's how perceived public opinion really fucks things up. In Somalia there was polling evidence to support retaliation against Aideed; but the Clinton administration thought the public wanted us to get the hell out before something else went wrong. This perceived opinion weighed heavily on their decision making process.
Right - my point was that I'm unconvinced that a simple "percentage who hold the view" statistic is the right way to measure public opinion at all, because public opinion isn't just a mere piece of data, but a fairly complex interplay of ideologies. The question of whether various things were "too soon" after 9/11 is a good example here - there was, to my mind, a clear point where that question stopped being about one's personal feelings so much as a sort of tautology - a widespread public opinion that there was a widespread public opinion about 9/11
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