Imagine all the people, blogging anonymously

Had an interesting conversation today about this blog post in Tiny Revolution. An anonymous blogger named Thorstein Veblen clearly got under the skin of one Greg Mankiw, a conservative economic bigwig at Harvard. For this, Thorstein has earned my eternal loyalty. BUT, I thought, can one truly be loyal to Anon? (Probably not. Anon would laugh at you.)

My interesting conversation was about the nature of democracy-- specifically, democratic discourse. I imagine an America where anonymous bloggers are not described as insolent, ignorant cowards, but as ordinary people who feel they need to protect themselves or as carriers of ideas whose owners are irrelevant. In other words, I imagine an America where people and their egos are not only anonymous, but for all intents and purposes, invisible. Imagine an America with no leaders -- no Bushes, no Clintons, no Obamas -- only pure ideas undiluted by prejudice, jealousy or grandeur. I am talking about a pure democracy. My partner in conversation replied, "So, you want a parliamentary system? Where the party is elected first, then the executive emerges from within the party?" I said, "Hmm. Yeah, I suppose that gets us halfway there."