Junk politics:
a voter's guide to the post-literate election

1. Junk politics personalizes and moralizes issues
and interests rather than clarifying them.
It's impatient with articulated conflict,
enthusiastic about Americans' optimism and moral character,
and heavily dependent on feel-your-pain language and gesture.


2. Junk politics takes changelessness as a major cause
--changelessness meaning zero interruption
in the processes and practices
that strengthen existing, interlocking systems
of socioeconomic advantage.

3. Junk politics introduces new qualifications
for high political office,
and in the process redefines traditional values.
It tilts courage toward braggadocio,
sympathy toward mawkishness,
humility toward self-disrespect,
identification with ordinary citizens toward distrust of brains.

4. Junk politics miniaturizes large, complex problems at home
while maximizing threats from abroad.
It's also given to abrupt unexplained reversals
of its own public stances,
often spectacularly bloating problems previously miniaturized.

5. Junk politics seeks at every turn
to obliterate voters' consciousness
of socioeconomic and other differences in their midst.

(thanks again to wood s lot)