Well no. In this marketplace of ideas, we're all sellers. You only have to convince a buyer of the positive proposition to buy, but with a seller you first have to manage the much more difficult trick of convincing him to first abandon his own "product" before considering yours. That realization is one reason I'm more interested in "foundational" stuff--I won't be buying the product, but I'm interested in the "manufacturing process", the thought processes that produce it. Thus my focus, in this case, on the insufficiency of logic alone in comprehending human affairs.

It's not so much a matter of debugging your head personally, but I think that the attempt to understand this way of thinking may provide some insight into larger issues such as why the Iraq war has gone so badly. Bush and the gang logicked themselves into thinking it would be easy, perhaps because logic only revealed material and physical challenges; logic is fine for logistics, but it doesn't explain the human mind and the phenomenon of politics. It left out completely how the Iraqis would feel about the invasion and occupation and how they would react according to their own internal and highly emotional value systems. It may be that because Bush et al considered our own system logically superior to the system in place in Iraq, they just assumed that it would automatically supplant the older system on the strength of its logic alone.

Iraq is one of the most dramatic illustrations of the insufficiency of logic in human affairs that we've seen in a long, long, time.

There's a profound truth in your observation that "the line has been moving steadily left for seventy years". Yes it has. It's called social evolution. In fact, one might say that human history, on the large scale, has always been about liberalization. The United States itself was one of those harebrained Liberal ideas.

Seventy years is three generations and one human lifetime, more than long enough for the pulse of liberalization applied in the 1930s to have become the new American mainstream. Seventy years is long enough to say that the society we have today is not an aberration, and certainly not some anomaly imposed on us by some shadowy cabal of Commies...the present "liberal" America is the America that Americans want and have freely chosen to have. Despite the paradox and illogic of it, Conservatives have been attempting a revolution in America, to impose through intimidation, fearmongering, and emotional manipulation, a radical shift to the right, in a matter of a few years, as large as the one that's taken seventy years to happen naturally.

That's been rough on America, and we don't thank you for it. We needed unity, and got divisiveness.

You're arguing the strict constructionist (a.k.a. "sacred relic") school of Constitutional interpretation, which is itself one manifestation of authoritarianism: The documents are authoritative and therefore sacrosanct and (somewhat superstitiously) embody strong juju in their fibrous substance.

I have the advantage of arguing from the position that the Constitution and other source documents are "living", and that we the people have the right to modify the terms and conditions of our system of governance. This leaves me free to draw upon those documents for precedent, but without being bound by them as if they're scripture. So basically I won that part of the argument by default ;-). What I'm saying, seriously, is that if we the people choose to use government as the instrument for accomplishing some goal we feel is worthy, whether it's landing a man on the Moon or providing health care for ourselves, we're damn well free to do it. If we weren't free to do so, could we claim to live in a free society? Of course not.

You really think it's going to stop with socialized health care?

I certainly hope it doesn't stop with universal health care, heck no. I hope for things to get better; I hope for change, not the dismal status quo.