Political polarization

“ Under a false notion of fealty these men subject their neck to the party collar and go to the polls yoked with ignorance and crime, and at the heels of some low-browed political dictator they sacrifice their country’s weal on the altar of partisan allegiance. ”

“ A new man with a new political method had entered the arena and had boldly offered an election bill which, if passed and enforced, would create a State-wide revolution, for it would rob the people of local self-government and centralize power in the hands of a triumvirate that would be the creature of his government and, under the control of no court or jury, the supreme master of the State and absolute master of the people. ”

“ To "make political capital," as their slang phrase goes, for themselves or party, the most obvious policy of the country is disregarded, the plainest requirements of morality and common sense set aside, and the worst impulses of the people watched, waited on, and stimulated into madness. To listen to the debates in Congress, one would think the sole object of its members in coming together, was to make themselves and their country contemptible. ”

“ To escape, in fine, from that routine of alternate violence and falsehood, to place political power in the region within which the conservative interests of social order naturally predominate with enlightened independence, and to secure to those interests, by the direct election of deputies from the country, a free and strong action upon its Government,—such were the objects, without reserve or exaggeration, of the authors of the electoral system of 1817. ”

“ Consider, for a moment, how much more violent the proceedings of majorities in the American Legislatures would be, how much more reckless the appeals to popular passion, how much more frequently the permanent interests of the nation and the rights of individuals and classes would be sacrificed to the object of raising political capital for present uses, if debates or discussions affected the tenure of office. ”

“ Is it not well and necessary to break the despotic partisan rule which vociferously pronounces the sentence of political death upon every man who dares to have an independent opinion; which insolently threatens the first commercial city of the State with injurious legislation, if the people of that city, true to their honest and patriotic impulses, refuse to work into the hands of partisan rings ”

“ We have witnessed for more than a quarter of a century the struggles of the two great political parties for power and plunder, while grievous wrongs have been inflicted upon the suffering people. We charge that the controlling influences dominating both these parties have permitted the existing dreadful condition to develop without serious effort to prevent or restrain them. Neither do they now promise us any substantial reform. ”

“ The growth and security of extra-legal unpopular government rests upon the increase of the political burdens upon the voter. Every political theory, every governmental bogey, and every practical innovation which tends toward the multiplication of elective offices, the frequency of elections and the consequent decentralization of the power of government, whether state or local, must be advocated and encouraged by the politocrat. ”

“ But any government which an insurgent people attains by elections must necessarily be a leaden weight on its feet, especially in so immense an economic, political, and moral reorganization as the social revolution. ”

“ On the contrary it grows more and more distrustful of mere parliamentarism. It has learned the lesson that political power is merely the reflex of economic power, and that political advantage can only be had through economic superiority ”

“ Voting is done more recklessly; it is harder to arouse the people to the necessity of reforms and more difficult to carry them out; political differences are ceasing to be differences of principle, and abstract ideas are losing their power; parties are passing into the control of what in general government would be oligarchies and dictatorships. These are all evidences of political decline. ”

“ Assemblies have been elected by universal suffrage, whose tendencies have been reactionary and undemocratic, and who have been supported in this reactionary policy by an effective public opinion. Or the French people have by means of a plebiscite delegated their Sovereign power to an Imperial dictator, whose whole political system was based on a deep suspicion of the source of his own authority. A particular group of political institutions or course of political action may, then, be representative of the popular will, and yet may be undemocratic. ”

“ Thus the question of what really needs to be enacted by the state in order to secure the conditions under which a good life is possible, is lost sight of in the quest for majorities; and as the will of the people in any other sense than the measure of what the people will tolerate is really unascertainable in the great nations of Europe, the way is prepared for the sophistries of modern political management, for manipulating electoral bodies, for influencing elected bodies, and procuring plébiscites. ”

“ Is it not the case that at present there is no opposition between the two elements of the nation, but that, if both had equal political power, there is a probability that the social reforms required might become matter of political partizanship, and so the weaker go to the wall? ”

“ The plea of bringing the government back to the people was catching and plausible, and it found eager response in the deeply rooted dislike of party machinery, party discipline and party constancy on the part of those who habitually neglect all attention to politics and the political duties of citizenship except during periods of popular excitement and upheaval. ”

“ But when enfranchisement reaches the stratum where the common man is found; the legislature meets with a new influence altogether. The elector, the creator of parliamentary majorities, is now a man who is not in an economic position to protect himself. Indeed, he is the victim of his economic weakness, and he has to depend on his political power to adjust the balance in his favour. The state becomes his ally not his rival. An opposition between the man and the state is not present to the minds of the majority. ”

“ That potent, though silent weapon, the ballot, is a sure correction of all abuses when intelligently used. The signs of the times are hopeful from the fact that, for the first time in many years, the people, especially the agricultural, producing, and laboring classes are taking the lead. They are reading, thinking and acting independently of old political and partisan leaders; they are exercising their rights as freemen. ”

“ The ruling party has overridden the voice of the people, usurped their sovereignty, oppressed the laboring classes by discriminating and unjust taxation, and that as a means of perpetuating its domination and enriching political adventurers. ”

“ They have calmed disturbing political elements;—the press is purified, the politician disarmed, the civil service well regulated. Hurtful partisanship is passing away. Since the people as a whole will never willingly surrender their sovereignty, reactionary movement is possible only in case the nation should go backward. ”

“ All these groups go back to the early traditions and history of the races, they sharpen up old grievances, and oppose each other vigorously in the Imperial Chamber of Representatives. They are, in fact, endeavouring to construct an earlier formation of civil society, and to reverse the order of political amalgamation of small States into large ones which has been operating for centuries in Western Europe. ”

“ How little the men who drew up the American Declaration of Independence and framed the republic, anticipated that after some generations the legislature would lapse into the hands of wire-pullers; that its doings would turn upon the contests of office-seekers; that political action would be everywhere vitiated by the intrusion of a foreign element holding the balance between parties; that electors, instead of judging for themselves, would habitually be led to the polls in thousands by their “bosses;” ”

“ There comes a reactionary period after every political change, during which material interests prevail over national, and shameful appetites over noble passions; during such a period,—as Louis-Philippe's reign, for example—that government is in favour which fosters these selfish interests and surfeits ignoble passions. ”

“ In matters of local import, or of national convictions and traditions, there is a clash of formidable instincts, and the political problem becomes simplified. Two great groups, one conservative and the other liberal, both represented by tenacious leaders, disputed the supreme power in the government and in parliament. ”

“ What happens, by some intractable fate, is paralleled by our political and social courses, where, in some nominal monarchy, a popularized parliamentary system breaks down in venality and incompetence, and a revolutionary progress is made into anarchy by way of a theoretical "republic," as in Portugal, China, Russia, and the tottering states of the dismembered "Central Empires." ”

“ In consequence of the progress made by public opinion, and the happy subsidence of revolutionary agitations, the excessive governing has already diminished, and the disposition to it is rapidly declining. The annoyances inflicted by the political police are fast disappearing. ”

“ But among these there were divisions and factions on various questions more or less trivial, none of them approaching in importance or interest to the fundamental and irreconcilable conflict sure one day to arise between those who had accumulated wealth and those who had not. To gain their ends in one or another of these frivolous quarrels, each party in turn admitted to political influence section after section of what you call the proletariat; till in the year 3278 universal suffrage was granted, every man and woman over the age of twelve years [1] being entitled to a single and equal vote. ”

“ The attempts to deprive the colored people of their political rights, which appeared formidable, and were really troublesome for some time after the civil war, have given way to constantly growing efforts of political parties and their divisions to conciliate and win over the colored vote. ”

“ The Franchise Acts had apparently provided a solution of the old antithesis of Man versus the State by comprehending all men in the state; and the great value of those reforms was that they tended to eliminate force from the sphere of politics. When men could vote, there was less reason in rebellion; and the antithesis of Man versus the State has almost been reduced to one of Woman versus the State. But representative government, which promised to be ideal when every man, or every adult, had a vote, is threatened in various quarters. ”

“ Men have differed in opinion, and been divided into parties by these opinions, from the first origin of societies; and in all governments, where they have been permitted freely to think and to speak. The same political parties which now agitate the United States, have existed through all time. Whether the power of the people, or that of the should prevail, were questions which kept the States of Greece and Rome in eternal convulsions; ”

“ “Power, the instrument of collective puissance, created in society to mediate between labor and capital, is fatally chained to capital, and directed against the proletariat. No political reform can resolve this contradiction, since, by the admission of the politicians themselves, such a reform would only serve to give more energy and extension to power, and that unless the hierarchy were overthrown and society dissolved, power cannot affect the prerogatives of monopoly. ”

“ the imperial tradition and the federalist tradition; the authoritarian one and the libertarian one.
And again, on the eve of the great Social Revolution these two traditions stand face to face.
Between these two currents, always full of life, always battling in humanity,—the current of the people and the current of the minorities which thirst for political and religious domination,—our choice is made.
We again take up the current which led men, in the twelfth century, to organise themselves on the basis of a free understanding, of free initiative of the individual, of free federation of those interested. ”

“ Yet if Despotism failed only for want of a capable benevolent despot, what chance has Democracy, which requires a whole population of capable voters: that is, of political critics who, if they cannot govern in person for lack of spare energy or specific talent for administration, can at least recognize and appreciate capacity and benevolence in others, and so govern through capably benevolent representatives? ”

“ When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character. Political power, properly so called, is merely the organized power of one class for oppressing another. ”

“ All political arrangements, in that they have to bring a variety of widely-discordant interests into unity and harmony, necessarily occasion manifold collisions. From these collisions spring misproportions between men's desires and their powers; and from these, transgressions. The more active the State is, the greater is the number of these. ”

“ My mind is appalled at the thought of a political party having control of all the details that go to make up the sum total of our lives. Think of it for an instant, that the party in power shall have all authority to dictate the kind of books that shall be used in our schools and universities, government officials editing, printing, and circulating our literature, histories, magazines and press, to say nothing of the thousand and one activities of life that a people engage in, in a civilized society. ”