Are we a nation of political comparison Shoppers?

"In this way, of course, money only mirrors other aspects of our political moment, where the prevailing mood generally seems to swing from one kind of antiestablishment ethos to another. In the age of eBay and Priceline, we are now a nation of comparison shoppers, inclined to trade one governing approach for another with a frequency that would have been unthinkable 20 years ago. While one party holds power, the other is always busy learning the tactical lesson of its most recent defeat and counting the months until it can strike back."

Do people agree with this assessment of Americans as political comparison shoppers? Is it true that the majority just hates whoever is in power or is it just the vocal minority? It seems as if this is more tied to the economy, which is ever more frequently undergoing crises, than to some new techno-psychological behavior on the part of the masses.

From: Campaign Money Tends to Flow to the Opposition - October 20, 2010

Zizek: First as Tragedy, Then as Farce Part IV: On Revolution

   How might Zizek’s Communist hypothesis become more than a hypothesis? How does a real political revolution happen in a post-industrial capitalist state? Zizek is not extremely optimistic about our current state of affairs, but he does offer a few guidelines and examples. Drawing on Kant’s writings about the French revolution, Zizek points out Kant's notion of enthusiasm, which extends throughout the socio-political landscape in a type of wave effect. He informs us that “Kant interpreted the French revolution as [a] sign, which pointed towards the possibility of freedom: the hitherto unthinkable happened, a whole people had fearlessly asserted its freedom and equality . . . even more important than the often bloody reality of the events in the streets of Paris was the enthusiasm those events gave rise to in the eyes of sympathetic observers all around Europe.” Zizek seeks out this enthusiasm in today’s world, looking to the election of Barrack Obama, where he suggests, “[I]n light of the Kantian conception of enthusiasm . . . Obama’s victory should be viewed not simply as another shift in the eternal parliamentary struggle for a majority, with all its pragmatic calculations and manipulations. It is a sign of something more.”