note taking. posted elsewhere

Delong links to Krugman. "NOT ENOUGH PEOPLE WILLING TO CALL OUT LIES FOR WHAT THEY ARE…"
He let my comment stand.

When was it ever not the case? And you have your own history of knee-jerk response.

In moments of general crisis the number of people who speak out publicly on any issue increases, but otherwise the normative assumptions of the majority of which the elite is a subset rule almost unchecked. 

Find me one political, cultural, intellectual fight where reason on its own was seen to win out. Fights for racial and gender equality and gay rights were led by members of those groups, whose knowledge came from shared experience. Popular assumptions changed as a result of outsiders forcing their stories on an indifferent majority (let's ignore for a minute that women make up half the population). That we now have male professors of women's studies or white experts in African American history helps to elide the fact that experts are only experts within the formal systems they're a part of. Mathematics is universal because it's formal. Its application is neither.

I'm not a Deconstructionist; I'm not even a college professor, but I'm still trying to figure out how you reconcile your prescription of cardboard tomatoes for the urban lower middle class and those below either with liberalism or science, even in the broadest sense.

I'll leave it to historians to explain to our great grandchildren just what we stood for and why. Historians will look back at this age with all the contempt this age has had for history.