Quotes About Politics

While governing is a full-time, continuous activity, demotic politics is inevitably episodic, born of necessity, improvisational rather than institutionalized

Inverted totalitarianism follows a different route. Instead of pursuing unanimity, it encourages divisiveness; instead of rule by a single master race, it promotes predomination—that is, rule by diverse powers which have found it in their interests to combine while retaining their separate identities.

Freedom and democracy, far from posing a threat to "free enterprise," become its instrument and its justification. And rather than serving as the means for furthering the political project of democratization, the state helps to inter it. vi

The two constitutions—one for expansion, the other for containment—form the two sides of inverted totalitarianism.

Thus, early on, while the people were declared "sovereign," they were precluded from governing.

No major politician or party has so much as publicly remarked on the existence of an American empire. Imperial power is not about restraint, and the consequences of empire are evident in domestic politics: in military expenditures, subsidies to globalizing corporations, mounting deficits, and the decimation of social programs and environmental safeguards.

It is commonly observed that today's domestic politics has changed in tactics and ferocity with the avowed aim of establishing a permanent Republican majority, the domestic equivalent of imperial hegemony, heralding a new politics and citizenry.

The emergence of Superpower and its joint imperium of state and corporation have resulted in the institutionalization and normalization of corruption. The doctored accounts, the public misrepresentations, and illegal transactions that have become a commonplace of corporate behavior in recent years have been transmitted to party politics

In the new model the presidency bears little resemblance to the original conception of a national leader and chief executive; it owes even less to the later ideal of the president as "the tribune of the people.

In contrast, inverted totalitarianism is only in part a state-centered phenomenon. Primarily it represents the political coming of age of corporate power and the political demobilization of the citizenry.

The result is that citizenship, or what remains of it, is practiced amidst a continuing state of worry. Hobbes had it right: when citizens are insecure and at the same time driven by competitive aspirations, they yearn for political stability rather than civic engagement, protection rather than political involvement.

In the end these efforts at postponing the issue of slavery failed. The Civil War put in doubt the capability of free politics to keep up with an expanded scale. The proof was in the failure of postwar Reconstruction: despite military occupation democracy and racial equality failed to take hold in the South.

The citizen is irrelevant. He or she is nothing more than a spectator, allowed to vote and then forgotten once the carnival of elections ends and corporations and their lobbyists get back to the business of ruling.

Aristotle noted that leisure was a necessary condition in the politics of a good society.31 Or, as an early twentieth-century populist rephrased it, "Raise less corn and more hell.

The system would remain in place even if the Democratic Party attained a majority; and should that circumstance arise, the system will set tight limits to unwelcome changes, as is foreshadowed in the timidity of current Democratic proposals for reform.

He foresaw the moral and political decay that would see a culture entranced by celebrity and reality television elect Donald Trump to the presidency. He called on us, always, to resist.

One practical consideration that causes the corporationists to play along with religious zealots and political doctrinaires is that archaism helps to neutralize the power of the Many.

For almost a half century the new war was defined in starkly Manichaean terms, as an epical struggle for the fate of the world between totalitarian dictatorship promoting atheism and communism, and the freedom-loving, God-fearing capitalist democracy of the United States and its Western European allies.

Over the centuries politicians and political theorists—starting with Plato's Republic—have emphasized disinterestedness, not personal advantage, as the fundamental virtue required of those entrusted with state power.

During the 1950s the ideological battles were centered on "loyalty," "subversion," "communism," and civil rights. While politics of the decade seemed intense, it was also narrower: socioeconomic problems were subordinated to ideological battles in which anticommunist ideologues did their best to link liberalism, the main force behind socioeconomic reform, with communism.46

Once the battle lines between communism and the "free society" were drawn, the economy became untouchable for purposes other than "strengthening" capitalism.

A medieval aphorism summed up the traditional idea of the political, "that which touches all should be approved by all.

The techniques developed for the marketplace have been adapted by political consultants and their media experts. The result has been the pollution of the ecology of politics by the inauthentic politics of misrepresentative government, claiming to be what it is not, compassionate and conservative, god-fearing and moral.

McCarthy was remarkable for a simple but matchless talent: he lied endlessly and spectacularly. No matter how often the lies were brought to light, he plunged on, exposing one after another alleged spy, traitor, red, or pinko, and in the process recklessly damaging or ending careers.