So much pawlitics to discuss this week!

Humphrey has had a very busy week! Of course, Thursday's provincial election meant a great deal of attention to matters of representative democracy. The Liberals, as everyone knows by now, won for a third straight term, though this time as a minority government. Humphrey's sentiment? Rather indifferent.
Now, in our representative democracy, every vote counts....but...on Sesame Street, every Count votes (think about that for a second while Humphrey prepares his remarks).

This brings us to Humphrey's special interest this week: Occupy Sesame Street. Given recent statistics indicating that 1% of Monsters consume 99% of cookies, Humphrey could not be more concerned about matters of carbohydrate distribution. He recognizes, of course, that he is among only 1% of dogs that consume 99% of Cheerios alloted to dogs, and that this may be equally unjust. So, a number of muppets have allegedly occupied Sesame Street to protest, though they've received little mainstream media coverage. Humphrey wanted to take part, asking everyone he met all week, "Can you tell me how to get, how to get to Sesame Street?"
Unfortunately, nobody offered a coherent answer, so he has not joined that protest.
In the mean time, he's also followed the media coverage about the copy-cat Wallstreet Occupation, and the impending other occupations of financial districts elsewhere.
To him, these occupations speak to the very sad absense of democracy (especially public forums for good discussion, and the civic skills to listen and learn). Obviously, the protesters are frustrated with several things. And obviously, the financial sector has a very different opinion about the matters at hand. But are they actually engaging in discourse? Are they making any effort whatsoever to give due consideration of the other's point of view?
Humphrey doesn't know for certain. But from his vantage point, it doesn't seem like any true civic discourse is happening.
He wishes that everyone would just invest in a book or two by Chantal Mouffe. The primary problem with a liberal democracy model, she writes,
…is its incapacity to come to terms with the nature of the political[i]. In one of its ver­sions, it reduces politics[ii] to the calculus of interests. Individuals are presented as rational actors moved by the search for the maximization of their self interest.
Mouffe asserts that “one of the main tasks of democracy consists in envisaging how it is possible to diffuse the tendencies to exclusion that are present in every construction of collective identities.” In Mouffe's ideal, which she calls agonistic democracy, everyone would just chill out and listen to one another. Talking is NOT persuading, listing is NOT blindly accepting. The idea is to come to an understanding of where the other person is coming from, and agreeing to disagree, but coming to compromise. Mouffe, interestingly, believes that consensus is just NOT possible for many public issues, so temporary compromise is the best we can hope for.
Humphrey has too much to read to get into the details of how these sorts of agonistic modes of communication would actually happen, but suffice to say they involve ground rules and civic skills. Humphrey learned the most about this via Simona Goi's published research in which she tested out agonistic communication among people on opposite sides of devisive issues, and it seems to work.
Now, he must seek out cookies before any elitist Monsters get their hands on them.

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[i] Mouffe defines the political as “the dimension of antagonism that is inherent in human relations”

[ii] Politics “consists in domesticating hostility and in trying to defuse the potential antagonism that exists in human relations”