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I'm talking about people who always talk a good game on the issues and usually vote the Democratic ticket. These people are not populists at heart and they have a sneering contempt for grass roots political action. Also, they generally have kind of a "ruling class" mentality which suggests that "experts" know what is best for the American people: government bureaucrats, college professors and journalists, for example.
These also tend to be people who are politically tone deaf, lacking any sense of political pragmatism. That happens when you spend all of your time on college campuses or in San Francisco or the Upper East side of Manhattan. Almost everyone I knew who voted for Ralph Nader in 2000 was from a well to do family, had a post-graduate degree, and was prone to over-philosophizing away the bottom line of the 2000 election. These people were not the ones who actually suffered the consequences of the Bush presidency. On the contrary, someone like Barbara Ehrenreich (a Florida Nader voter) arguably sold more books with Bush in the White House and got some nice taxcuts too.
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