Isaac & mistaken identity

["Gregoire de Nowell (ci-devant)" <GN842@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I think Isaac has been confused by Louis D. with someone who was
calling Issac names.  This is entirely possible given the
tendency for messages to get nested within messages.

I think Isaac's media discussion has been an instructive one and
of use to PKT.  In the end, the "issue" is the extent to which
non-dominant ideas can make their way into common discourse.  The
discussion has focused on the mass media, but it does not require a
great leap of the imagination to see the applicability to the
dominance of certain ideas in the academy.

I am surprised that no one has mentioned Anthony Downs work.  The
Bartlett citation (Economic Foundations of Political Power) is essentially
a left-wing version of Downs.  Downs simply argues that people are
busy raising families and doing their jobs.  They tend to have
"expert opinions" on matters relating to their own work--farmers on
farming, truckers on trucking, etc.--and tend, between work and family,
to have little time to develop opinions on other matters.

Even people in very privileged postions with essentially unlimited
appetite for political news reach a saturation point.  I don't
spend much time, when reading the newspaper, on housing, busing,
etc., because I find it all I can do to keep up with international
reltaions and learn some economics on the side.  The most perspicuous
radical commentary on the housing issue is simply an unknown factgor
to me.

Downs argues that economizing on political information is a necessary
feature of life.  One way that people do this is they "delegate"
their decisions to political parties (or other agents).  Thus,
I know very little about nuclear power, but I may "delegate"
my opinion to the Sierra Club, for example, if I trust that
entity.  In Europe more commonly people "delegate" to their
political party.  When I was in Fkrance in the 1970s,
French workers who were members of the CP knew that they
themselves did not have sophisticated opinions aobut the
macro-economy; but they did expect their party to have the guns
to represent them plausibly on those issues.

Party representation in this schema emerges as a key variable in
disseminating the amount of information, and prioritization of issues,
in politics generally.  It therefore behooves one to look at how
parties compete for voters and how institutional structures
govern how parties market themselves.

My main point here is that it is possible to have a "reasonable
view" on macro economic issues without reading a single page
of macro, without having the newspaper or the elelctronic media
even discuss it to any degree of depth.  To go to the polls
and vote, saying "this is my party, I have confidence in its
opinions and its ability to represent my interests" is a crucial
way for people who are raising families and working full time to
express opinions on issues that are outside their domain of
expertise or even interest.

Thus, in a certain sense, to locate the "media debate" we've
been having in what does or does not cause the media to clarry
carry certain subjects is a non-issue in the Downsian sense.
Even if newspapers did NOTHING but carry PKT and Marxist views
on macro and full employment there would still be many issues
left unexplored by them.  And it would still be rational for
people to "delegate" their views to parties.

The question then arises, what occurs when the parties are
captured by rival capitalist interests, etc.  This territory
is well covered by Bartlett, W. Dean Burnham, Thomas Ferguson,
etc., and I haven't the time to go into it.  But it needs
to be observed that the "average media content" might well
remain slanted towards lost dogs 'n' cats and robbers and that,
with an appropriate party apparatus, "intelligent" class
interests could be expressed.  The Downsian position in a
certain sense is anti-Jeffersonian: you don't _need_ a
fully informed electorate to vote rationally, and political
parties as an institution help mediate the problem of getting
complex issues to constituencies in ways that don't require
them to be on the lookout for the latest report on Federal
reserve activities or whatever.

It nonetheless is the case that parties, as institutions,
are more effective when they have a means to communicate their
views.  The American emphasis on "objective" reporting can,
in this light, be seen as a recipe for mass ignorance, since
its (false) presumption to present "the facts", and the
relative inability of parties to get their views out to
people on a daily basis, substantially works against the
Downsian view of rat'l voter behavior: one can only be
"rational" if there is an entity out there which represents me.
If such an entity is not there, I drop out of politics (the
Burnham thesis on non-voting).

Does all this help us?  Maybe not.  One could argue that we
don't have parties because the media do not present the information
which would make people wnat to organize into meaningful parties.
Or we could argue that the "media bias" (its basic position is
in favor of consumption and against sustained, activist, rational
thought) specifically relfects the constellation of power as
concretized in the U.S. party system, which is basically a
vehicle for competition among rival factions of capital.  I
don't know.  But I think if there is a lesson to be drawned
to be drawn from Downs, it is that it is not entirely inconceivable
that workers could spend most of their time between work
and family, and even what little reading time they have on the
SI swimsuit issue, and still express "rational, well developed
views" at the ballot box if the party apparatus is there to
]faciliate that.  To argue that there is or is not suppressed
demand for the kind of news coverage that most of us would
like to see (of which Henwood's LBO is an example) is,
from this perspective, besides the point.  *Of course most
people don't have the time for expert views.*  There's no
reason tired folks shouldn't "veg out" at the end of a hard
day's work.  But that is *not necessarily* what condemns
us to feeble discussion of political alternatives.

BTW, this has been extensively discussed; I would simply
point out, in closing, that one of Burnham's favorite
seminar lines, in discussing the institutional structure
of the U.S. and American political parties, was that the
U.S. government system was designed to create the appearance
of democracy but not the fact, and that all evidence of the
past two centuries indicates it has been spectacularly
successful at fulfilling its creators' objectives.

greg nowell