It's no so much that. It's the disconnect between the words and the actions.
And I am offering an explanation for said disconnect.
I don't Facebook... at this poing even Mark Zuckerberg is embarrassed the way Facebook is affecting political discourse. On the other hand, when leaders of major unions are denouncing this in the strongest possible terms, I take that more seriously.
You should have a peek sometime. The discussions are actually more reflective of a public I think.
As for major unions, I suspect they may have a teensy conflict of interest in denouncing trade deals.
Linking our labor market to the USA is one thing... it's an apples-to-apples comparison. Linking our labor market to countries like Malaysia and Vietnam is quite different.
Of course it's different but it's also unavoidable to address it somehow. You wouldn't be able to provide high enough tariffs to keep out their products anyway, so you might as well open the door for more high-end jobs to be created to counter the losses.
If citizens need to form "publics" as you call it, to represent our interests in public discourse, doesn't that suggest that our form of representative democracy is just a big fat sham?
Not at all. Democracy actually DEPENDS on such publics to drive the discussion from what people are actually talking about.
Conservatives are turning against corporations? News to me.
-k
The Trump ascendency is about anti-globalism which means anti-corporate.