I'm not saying that Amos's comments are not thoughtful and incisive. They often are. I am saying that it is not thoughtful and incisive comment that gets a politician elected in the USA, because the majority of voters are not swayed by thoughtful and incisive comment. They're highly suspicious of intellectuals, for heaven's sake! They don't trust them. They think that intellectuals are elitists who don't respect "working people". They are swayed by extremely crude superficial impressions and they trust people who reinforce those crude impressions which they are most familiar with and most in sympathy with...

I believe this is true of perhaps 90% of the electorate, and that's why the political parties deal primarily in marketing crude and usually mythological superficial impressions rather than in communicating much about reality.

And it just so happens that the Right has been far more clever for some time in how they go about creating and marketing those superficial impressions. They do it by appealing primarily to people's fear and their greed. The Left also does that, but the Left is, by definition, badly hampered in modern America...it's practically the only society in the world where the words "liberal" and "socialist" have attained mythological connections in the average person's mind with being "evil".

None of this has been done by reasoned argument or by any form of intelligent analysis. It's been done by marketing crude stereotypes and common myths to the general public. Superficial impressions.

It's the main reason why I can't be bothered listening to most political speeches. It makes me feel downright disgusted.