The "reality-based community" quote also came to my mind when I read the article, so I wonder if the writer also thought of it. It perhaps wasn't highlighted,

The "reality-based community" quote also came to my mind when I read the article, so I wonder if the writer also thought of it. It perhaps wasn't highlighted, though, because it further serves to undermine their point, since Rove and Trudeau are not what I would consider ideological allies, and it can't be ignored that ideology is making a huge difference to how events are playing out (and even underpins why there is a policy being protested against in the first place). I suppose there is a sense in which Rove and Trudeau share the same view on power, but that doesn't mean it is helpful to group them together as "Virtuals". We already have a word for people who try to influence the world using political power, and that word is "politician". While it's reasonable to say that politicians are often disconnected from the situation on the ground, that is not a new observation, and I think we need more than the examples of Iraq and the truckers protest in order to prove that the mentality of politicians is deficient. One could even argue that both Rove and Trudeau have actually been successful, since Bush got re-elected (and gained US military bases, and oil, and reconstruction contracts) due to the "disaster in Iraq", and Trudeau gets to paint his opponents as Nazis who are attacking the ordinary citizens that he is standing up for. A more insightful analysis might be that the powers available to politicians in modern Western democracies mean that certain types of problems can't be avoided (whether that's terrorism or pandemics), and that only a limited set of options are available to politicians for trying to solve them (such as war and law). The fact that wars are messy and some people are disruptive when their livelihoods are threatened is not really surprising.