During the recent Ontario election campaign, it was surprising to see that the letters to the editor in the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail in in each case opposite to the respective papers' editorial position.  The Globe's letters were consistently opposed to and critical of Harris' plans; the Star's were on both sides, though perhaps the majority were in one way or another supportive of Harris' "ideas."  It has been said that you can't fool all of the people all of the time.  But perhaps you can fool most of the people all of the time, if they happen to be foolish and uneducated to begin with.  It is quite likely that the average Globe reader is more highly educated than that of the Star.  So although one would expect the Globe reader's "objective interests" can be better served by the Harris agenda than by the Liberal or NDP ones, it is probably simply a lot more difficult to fool the Globe's average reader.  He or she is not going to fall for a foolish political platform, no matter what.  Compassion and doing the right thing are not simply subjective "liberal" bleeding-heart emotionalisms.  They also have an objective side, which is intelligence and higher education.  The intellectual elite, out of a kind of "good" snobbery, will not go in for plebian right-wing stances that repudiate high human ideals, which, after all, the elite imagines itself as having created.  Of course in fact another class' struggles created those ideals, but they are a bond between some of the lowest and highest classes.

What used to be "negative opinion of women" is now "misogyny." "Dislike of Blacks" is now "racism." "Dislike of foreigners" is now "xenophobia." and so on and so forth. What used to belong to the realm of personal attitudes (whether feeling or opinion) now has an objective impersonal interpretation. It has been removed from the socially-defined and/or sanctioned (either as allowed or as encouraged) personal realm to the social realm of psycho-socially defined ideosyncracy. A similar phenomenon has taken place in what is more strictly the realm of morality. In some cultures, it is considered a father's duty to avenge a "dishonoured" daughter. To us moderns, however, such an idea of moral duty seems rather farcical. The process is again the same as in the other case. In the case of the avenging father, the social sanction coincides with the personal attitude; society and the father agree on what is the right thing to do. In the modern situation, society has taken the decision as to what is the right thing to do out of the father's hand. However, what may at first seem like a loss of freedom is an increase of freedom. The old father was given no alternatives. The modern father has alternatives, including personal revenge.

The contemporary changes in the nature of the forces of production (the social content) have destabilized the relations of production (the social form) to the extent of destabilizing the liberal democratic political system itself. On the issue of the electorate's "loss of faith" in politicians, it should be remembered that this is in fact a "good thing," because, when translated out of the language of liberal democracy and into the language of revolutionary Marxism, it signifies a partial liberation from the constraints of capitalist ideology. Capital is inehrently incapable of justifying faith.