I have two winged homunculi hovering above my respective earlobes.
One assures me that Tocqueville was prescient: the fatal flaw of representative government resides in the inevitable witlessness of the people. And, though perhaps Alexis missed this, public education in the spirit of enabling self rule is in the end merely a palatable means to reinforcing elite dogma.
The other insists that worth remains in any attempt to reclarify basic principles, sunder the claims of the superstitious from those reasoned principles, and defend the formative ideas of the republic, namely freedom and attendant self-reliance; negative liberties; and the full functioning of risk and its implications.
Assuming that noone will read this, an expectation supported by the irrefutable economics of time, I plan to use this space to semi-privately work out the ideas of the latter and the emotional tension between the two.
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