Republicans don't want to shrink government. They want more and more military, more and more surveillance. They'd like to have the government banning gay marriage and so forth.

The more the society becomes a technological society, the less it has to hold itself together.

I don't think it could be a coincidence that the more technological a society is, the less it connects people.

Everyone can feel the nothingness, the void, just beneath the surface of everyday routines and securities.

The largely hidden key to the symbolic world is time; indeed it is at the origin of human symbolic activity. Time thus occasions the first alienation, the route away from aboriginal richness and wholeness.

Mass society has displaced real community, where people function together and account for their own lives.

"The people" aren't running anything. That's why technology has replaced politics as the source of ideology. The ideological claims are hollow and absurd, and nobody believes them anymore.