I received a video this morning from the Obama campaign. A former student interviewed me about my research on the link between bankruptcy and health care, and part of the interview appears in the clip. What struck me about the video is its vision. Obama lays out the case that we need universal health care because it is right. Hard-working Americans should not be struck down financially by a broken health care system. Drugs, health insurance coverage, and cancer treatments may save lives, but cost families their financial security.

Obama is not alone in advocating for universal health care coverage, but this video reminded me how far the debate has come. While Democrats debate who will provide the best plan, most Republicans look away. Obama makes it clear in this video that health care is one middle class promise that he will tie himself to: he is willing to be judged by the quality of what he can deliver. A tough, middle class economic issue has become one of the signature pieces that defines this presidential season.

Thus far we've been exploring some risks associated with certain uses of the Internet. Let's turn to another, happier side. The central ideas come from Friedrich Hayek, the great twentieth century critic of socialism and defender of market arrangements. Hayek's ideas bear directly on open source software, wikis, prediction markets, and perhaps much more.

Hayek’s most important contribution to social thought is captured in his short 1945 paper, “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” Hayek claims that the real advantage of prices is that they aggregate both the information and the tastes of numerous people, incorporating far more material than could possibly be assembled by any central planner or board, however expert and well-motivated. Hayek emphasizes above all the unshared nature of information -- the “dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.”

Over a decade ago, Nicholas Negroponte discussed the possible emergence of the Daily Me -- a fully personalized newspaper. Such a newspaper would allow you to include those topics and ideas that interest you, or that you like, and to screen out those topics and ideas that bore you, or that you dislike. Many people are now using the Internet to create something like a Daily Me. And many people are now celebrating the rise of countless niches, of long tails, and of collaborative filtering, all of which promote personalization.

What is wrong with countless editions of the Daily Me? One problem is an absence of shared experiences: diverse nations need some social glue, and shared experiences can provide that glue, because they give people a sense that they are involved in a common enterprise. National holidays are important partly for that reason. Shared communications experiences, as opposed to information cocoons, have a similar function. (Think of a presidential debate.)

Thanks much to all for the excellent comments. For those who'd like to see the formal write-up of the Colorado experiment, see this link; the final version appeared in the California Law Review. The paper is by David Schkade, Reid Hastie, and me; the first two, unlike the third, are terrific social scientists who know how to conduct experiments of this kind.

One more set of data before a little analysis: Federal judges sit on three-member panels. Assignment is random. Panels consist of the following possible combinations: three Republican appointees; three Democratic appointees; two D appointees and one R appointee; and two R appointees and one D appointee. We now know that in ideologically contested areas (eg sex discrimination, disability discrimination, environmental protection, labor relations), R appointees show VERY conservative voting patterns on RRR panels -- and D appointees show VERY liberal voting patterns on DDD panels. There's far more moderation on mixed panels. (The details can be found in Cass R.Sunstein et al., Are Judges Political? (Brookings 2006). The statistical analysis was done by David Schkade, the second author,who is a specialist on that sort of thing.)

What are the effects of the Internet on democracy? The answer depends, of course, on how people use the Internet. But let's begin with a possible clue, coming from a small experiment in democracy, held in Colorado in 2005.

About sixty American citizens were brought together and assembled into ten
groups, each consisting of five or six people. Members of each group were
asked to deliberate on three of the most controversial issues of the day: Should
the United States sign an international treaty to combat global warming? Should
states allow same-sex couples to enter into civil unions? Should employers
engage in affirmative action by giving a preference to members of traditionally
disadvantaged groups?

Thank you to Stephen Ducat for his smart and sane rejoinder. If the last several exchanges demonstrate anything, it is the truth of the statement in Stephen’s excellent and enlightening book, The Wimp Factor: “Observers of contemporary politics, especially those who follow the high drama of presidential campaigns, are plagued by many questions. Most vexing, perhaps, are those concerned with the role of gender in public life.”

I found especially useful in Stephen’s post—and applicable to both the recent back-and-forth on this site and to comprehending the post-9/11 climate as a whole--his observation that, “As Freud understood it, the unconscious does not just refer to that part of ourselves we don't know, but concerns those things we don't want to know.”

I end my contribution to this conversation where it began, with appreciation. Thank you, Andrew and Ned, for creating space for me at the table. I want the contributors, both fellow discussants and bloggers, to whom I have been unable to respond to know that their important insights have not been overlooked. Rather it has been the constraints of time and the exigencies of my brick and mortar day jobs that have limited my ability to reply.

On the one hand, I appreciate it when critics take my ideas seriously enough to dispute them. On the other hand, I have grown weary of having to begin so many debates by stating what I am not arguing. Clearing the discursive battlefield of the bodies of straw men (as well as straw feminists) mowed down by Matt Zeitlin is a dirty job but somebody’s got to do it. (Thank you, Susan for beginning this onerous task. I’ll try not to be too redundant of your cogent retort.) Neither Susan nor I hold any of the reductionist positions he duels with. Nothing in either of our posts, in my book, or her book (I have read it) could be construed as an assertion that any social, political, or military event was inevitable. There has been no claim that individual leaders can have no influence in the outcome of those events or on the probability that they would come about at all. Neither of us has argued that certain traumas from our collective past, hypermasculinity, sexism, gendered narratives, and unconscious conflicts are the sole determinants of political behavior. On the latter point, you might want to reread the last sentence of my post: “…an invasion of Iraq becomes the preferred strategy of counter-humiliation (in addition to satisfying imperial and economic motives)…”

That it is even necessary to say these things does raise some interesting questions. What is it about recognizing the power of the affective and unconscious realms of human experience that leads otherwise intelligent, thoughtful people to work so hard to diminish its significance? Why is it necessary to transform a psychologically informed explanatory model of politics into a caricature in order to challenge it?

First, thank you, Matt, for now having read the book—which puts you way ahead of those reviewers who made me “cranky”--and your continued effort to express what bothers you about my thesis.

I also want to thank Amanda for her perceptive observations in her post this morning, and especially for bringing into the discussion the intriguing findings from the field of terror management theory. I particularly appreciated her point that this is historical analysis, not quantifiable science, and that there’s a place for that.

Matt, it seems to me that you have not responded to my particular objections to your first post (are you conceding that the fact that Bush/Cheney wished to invade Iraq even pre-9/11 does not devalue my thesis?) while reiterating an overall “scientific” disqualifier.

Matt's initial post and reply to Susan's book seem to be based on an unwillingness to take a big picture stance. He writes:

Call me simple minded, but it looks to me that she is trying to weave in our reactionary cultural response to 9/11 with our militaristic foreign response.

Call me simple-minded, but I do recall that our foreign "response" to the attacks on 9/11, particularly the Iraq War, can only be considered a "response" in light of the fact that there was a full-blown, Goebbels-level amount of propaganda aimed squarely at an American public still shattered by 9/11 in order to get public support for the war. It's true that the Iraq War was planned long before 9/11, but the Bush administration opportunistically pounced on American anxieties to get support for the war. It's the both/and way of looking at things. The Iraq War was the result both of a long term neocon scam and the propaganda blitz after 9/11 to garner support for the war.

It's also true that Faludi's book isn't about the plans to invade Iraq, but about the formation of the anxieties that fed the propaganda effort. There are books about the plans to invade Iraq; I don't see why insisting that all books be on that. The anxieties that made us easy to propagandize to is a pefectly legitimate thesis for a book.