This Is Democracy?

Patrick Deneen on polling and democracy.  The post is long and thoughtful, so sure to be ignored.  Just one paragraph of this remarkable piece:

What a polling regime effectively does is to reinforce the worst aspect of both the Federalists and Anti-federalists. On the one hand, as the Federalists intended, it leaves the citizenry undisturbed and unchallenged in their private concerns and interests. Polling seeks merely to sound out an expression of our interests: it possesses no deliberative aspect, no interactive opportunity; it is passive and impersonal. From incessant polling we learn that we are bundles of interests, that we can be dissected into a particular voting blocs, that we should learn to match our particular interests to a particular candidate (and vice-versa). On the other hand, representatives seek to "mirror" or parrot the views of some portion of the electorate they believe will give them an electoral majority, but without the accompanying deliberation that the Anti-federalists hoped and expected would be the result of local and more personal politics. Polling both reinforces our self-understanding as simultaneously a collection of preferences and as tiny and insignificant fractions of the overall electorate. We come to understand that we matter only inasmuch as we express some set of pre-packaged interests while also understanding that, in a mass electorate, we don't really matter at all. Polling is a reflection of the reality of mass democracy, a reality that shapes us rather than merely seeks to discover our "opinions." Viewed as merely a "tool" of democracy (or social science), we overlook how deeply it shapes and influences our worldview - especially how it reinforces an emphasis that what matters most in politics is raw and unadulterated interest, and what politics is not and cannot be is a form of deliberation.