ABSTRACT
When today’s harried middle class—especially those educated aspirants to vanishing upper-middle-class status—wish to remain au courant on the “big” ideas that elude the confines of TV’s The Daily Show or The Office, they can turn twice a week to David Brooks in The New York Times for the Burkean conservative line, or to his colleague, Paul Krugman, for the leftish political-economy that escaped notice in their introductory economics course. Discussions of their sentiments, and those of a few other blue-ribbon columnists available (temporarily?) for free via computer, have become the lingua franca of serious-minded people, in seminars as well as the grocery line. Our “public sphere,” the eighteenth century origins of which Jürgen Habermas investigated sixty years ago, has probably benefitted from this ready access to intelligent commentary, and it becomes ever harder therefore to “fool all of the people all of the time.”
