Anyone even slightly familiar with democratic ideals should reject out of hand this distinction between politics as the circulation of content and politics as the activity of oficials. The fundamental premise of liberal democracy is the sovereignty of the people. Governance by the people is exercised through communicative freedoms of speech, assembly, and the pressj it relies on norms of publicity that emphasize transparency and accountability; it consists of the deliberative practices of the public sphere. Democratic communication steers, influences, or, more minimally, informs politics as the governing and legislating activity of elected oficials. Ideally, the communicative inter�ctions of the public sphere, the circula� tion of content and media chatter, not only impact but also constitute oficial politics.
In the United States today, however, they don't. Less bluntly put, there is a significant disconnect between politics circulating as content and oficial politics. Pundits gesture to this disconnect when they refer to the bubble of concerns "inside the Beltway" and the "real concerns" of "ordinary voters:' So multiple opinions and divergent points of view express themselves in myriad intense exchanges, but this circulation of content in dense, intensive global communications networks actually relieves toplevel actors (corporate, institutional, and governmental) from the obligation to answer embedded in the notion of a message. Reactions and rejoinders to any claim are always already present, presupposed. In this setting, content critical of a specific policy is just another story or feature in a $2 4 / 7$ news cycle, just another topic to be chewed to bits by rabid bloggers. Criticism doesn't require an answer because it doesn't stick as criticism. It functions as just another opinion ofered into the m.edia-stream. So rather than responding to messages sent by left activists and critics, top-level actors counter with their own contributions to the circulating flow of communications-new slogans, images, deflections, and attacks; staged meetings or rallies featuring their supportersj impressive photo-ops that become themselves topics of chatter. Suficient volume (whether in terms of the number of contributions or the spectacular nature of a contribution) gives these contributions their dominance or stickiness.
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