Meant to add links to a couple relevant Stross articles:
A Bad Dream -- wherein he posits that the three major parties in the UK aren't actually Labour, Conservative, and Liberal Democrat, but Left, Right, and Establishment.
Obviously there are rather a lot of important differences between the US Congress and the UK Parliament, starting with the fact that one of them is a parliament (and whose upper house is an actual, literal aristocracy), but I think his general point applies in a lot of ways. Despite posturing to the contrary, the party leadership here -- Obama, Boehner, Pelosi, Reid, McConnell -- have more in common with each other, from an actual policy perspective, than they do with the bases of their respective parties, or with the people who elected them.
And, increasingly, we're seeing that the bases of the parties, at least under certain circumstances, have more in common with each other than they do with their leadership -- drones, surveillance, and Syria are all recent issues where there's been bipartisan support among the leadership and bipartisan opposition among the rank-and-file.
Nothing really to add to those thoughts just at the moment, so on to the next article,
Spy Kids.
I intend to discuss this one more when I start blogging again, but it's very pertinent to our discussion of the generation gap. Stross discusses an issue near and dear to my heart, the notion that
company loyalty is dead because companies (public and private) no longer take care of their workers. He argues that, regardless of your feelings on whether Snowden was right or wrong, his disclosure is the inevitable result of an independent contractor who (1) feels no loyalty to the organization he's working for and (2) has not been sufficiently vetted to evaluate as a security risk because that's a lot harder to do with an independent contractor.
It's also the inevitable result of a generation that still believes in the ideals it's been told America is supposed to represent, and routinely sees the state violating them. Stross argues that within a generation or two the former will no longer be the case.