A fundamentalist approach to history, which you see in and around the Tea Party, insists that the Constitution was divinely inspired and speaks to us, across the ages, and is therefore incontrovertible, and outside the sphere of political debate, or even of interrogation.
Within the sphere of legitimate debate there is some variance.
Call the middle region "sphere of legitimate debate," and the outer region "sphere of deviance".
The sphere of legitimate debate is the one journalists recognize as real, normal, everyday terrain.
Atrios, the economist and liberal blogger with a big following, has a more colorful phrase for "maintaining boundaries around the sphere of legitimate debate".
Among the first things they may do is establish that the "sphere of legitimate debate" as defined by journalists doesn't match up with their own definition.
In the age of mass media, the press was able to define the sphere of legitimate debate with relative ease because the people on the receiving end were atomized meaning they were connected "up" to Big Media but not across to each other.
Of course, the producers of Meet the Press could say in a press release, "We decided that Pat Robertson's CBN is now within the sphere of legitimate debate because... .. but then they would have to complete the "because" in a plausible way and very often they cannot.
Russians have adopted the Web not only as a public sphere for debate but also as a refuge of last resort, a citizens' court to vent anger at and post evidence of official malfeasance.
He argued that poetry emerged in the late 70s because of the way in which the military dictatorship of the time closed down other spheres of political debate and cultural intervention in politics.
The first is that a healthy democracy requires a vibrant sphere of public political debate.
