Tag: Elizabeth Spiers

“I like that the electorate is able to vote against the establishment when they’re pissed off. But I don’t like it when they don’t seem to know who the establishment is (say, a third generation real estate scion with inherited wealth who appears to have squandered much of it) and that the most important decisions that we make as citizens require no real accountability on the part of the electorate — just a general impression of who the candidate is, based on soundbites and entertainment-oriented media constructions. […] People who can’t locate Benghazi on a map will invoke it while not being able to articulate what our Libyan policy was in the first place because it’s a meme at this point, not an actual event that happened with verifiable facts. […] People who flock to demagogues don’t exactly have an empirical bent in the first place.” — Elizabeth Spiers