This blog's primary mission has been to make the attempt to understand the nature of cultural change and its political effects. My basic premise has been that we are in the midst of dizzying changes that we mostly don't understand, that our politics has been several years behind the curve because of its principals' commitment to insider gaming and fighting small-minded, parochial "interest" battles.
Any politics seriously engaged with issues concerning the common good or any reality outside the Beltway bubble will be connected to the ability of sane Americans to organize and demand that the system be responsive to their common interests, but there's little reason to hope that might happen any time soon. As a nation we've most of us become docile observers, like sports fans, of our politics rather than engaged participants. We don't really, on the whole, believe that much is at stake in our politics, and we treat it mostly as an entertainment, and we won't treat it more seriously until we feel the negative consequences of decisions made in the past eight years and even now, but by that time it will have been too late.