@light Most people join… something. Maybe a political party, maybe some other thing. The people there know one another, know their shared values and interests. They choose people to act politically on their behalf, stay in continuous contact with those people, engage in politics primarily through them (or occasionally by replacing them), not by interacting with media and anonymously voting or writing congresspeople or whatever. 1/

@light Those people are professionals, like lawyers. Their job isn’t to dress like or talk like the people they represent. It is to continuously communicate and serve as a bridge between the institutions of political negotiation and contestation (e.g. Congress) and the group they represent, understanding their actual values and interests and competently pursuing those, discussing what is happening, what is practical or not and why, taking suggestions from those they represent. 2/

@light People engage in politics primarily via and through people they personally know and interact with. /fin

@light You are right, by the way, that I favor the role of experts to be “how”, and the role of the democratic public to be “what”. But right now, the democratic public can’t even coherently express what it wants, even were experts to be punctilious about not arrogating choices, maximizing rather than overriding the scope of the democratic public.