Successfully negotiating the resonant dissonance of any democracy is indeed deeply problematised by an obligation to successfully define, negotiate and evolve strategies with which to do so. I see the contemporary American problem as being on one hand unique and specific to a particular entanglement of histories, motivations, incentives and value (or belief) systems but simultaneously as an instance, a microcosm of a broader principle and endemic bias in the self-organisational tautologies that (all) systems of governance tend to be or to become.
Long sentences, yes. Misdirective? Not necessarily. I feel quite strongly that we (are and will continue to) remain quite profoundly unable to reconcile the fractious partisan-tribal differences within these political systems if we can not acknowledge that whatever selection mechanisms and logic underlie them are as isomorphic within nations and ideologies as between them.
Yes, most people don’t care about theories of distributed complexity and cognition but, without them, I expect that current modalities of difference management in media and politics have reached their “carrying capacity”. The neuroses of a nation persist and thrive because they reproduce the systems that sustain them.
Daedelus Kite 