the public is not supposed to be naked, ill informed, rationally ignorant, and most of all without meaningful civil society institutions to whom to delegate their trust. 1/

we put people in a shrieky haunted house where nothing anyone says makes sense, and then condemn them when they say not that to either this shriek or that. 2/

if we want democracy to work, we’ll need foster the institutions under which a public can approximate rational constituencies. but we’ve killed those, because the “we” in this story for the most part adamantly does not want democracy to work. /fin