Quotes About Ideology

It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.

There are no longer moderates. There's no longer a center. There's either authoritarian populism (Trump) or democratic populism (represented in 2016 by Bernie's "political revolution").

Ideology is the light that creates darkness.

There are more martyrs to nonsense than truth, truth preferring missionaries.

The point is that the mind was philosophically awakened, that it felt the need for a coherent overall philosophical image of the world. To young Djugashvili, it was quite evidently a mark of Marxism's special strength as a socialist ideology that it had dialectical materialism—"an entire world-view"—as its matrix.

Born in strife, the original party of Russian Marxists died in schism.

Without a third revolution to carry off, there could be no second Lenin.

This became the generally accepted Russian Marxist position.

Although Lenin did not directly take issue with it, his own outlook differed radically.

the man of the future in Russia was the peasant, the muzhik; and economically backward, not-yet-capitalist Russia, blessed by the survival of its archaic village commune, might in fact be destined to lead the world to socialism.[11] Here in embryo was the socialist ideology of the Russian populist (narodrik) revolutionary movement that developed among the radical intelligentsia in the late fifties and sixties.

Russian Jacobinism.

Given all these conditions, it is not surprising that a section of the intelligentsia grew receptive to the ideology of proletarian socialist revolution being propagated by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. In a number of European countries there existed by this time Social Democratic parties professing Marxism as their program and acting in the name of the industrial working class as their principal constituency.

Stalin elaborated the Stalinist version of building socialism into a coherent ideological doctrine.

Judging by the pervasiveness of this theme in Djugashvili's early writings, and the way he emphasized it, he was strongly attracted to Marxism's vision of past and present society as a great battleground whereon two hostile forces—bourgeoisie and proletariat—are locked in mortal combat.

central to Stalinism, that the class struggle inevitably grows sharper with the country's advance toward socialism.

he advocated a strategy of pressing forward from the stage of democratic revolution represented in the Provisional Government to that of socialist revolution via the seizure of power and establishment of a "dictatorship of the proletariat." In an effort to validate this position ideologically, Lenin went back to his Marxist texts during an interval of forced inactivity during 1917 and wrote The State and Revolution, his principal work of political theory.

Leninism was in part a revival of Russian Jacobinism within Marxism.

During 1922 events moved swiftly toward a crisis in Lenin's relations with Stalin, who by this time felt sufficiently secure in his power base to assert views and persist in them even if they occasionally ran counter to Lenin's.

Not only did such an ideology legitimize the young man's resentment against the various forms of established authority, it identified his enemies as history's, bestowed higher meaning on his urge to live a life of combat against forces of evil, and sanctified his quest for vindictive triumphs along the way.

Russian nationalism was as alien to Lenin's makeup as it was congenial, deep down, to Stalin's.

socialist movement via the Third International,

Mao actually encouraged China's disagreements with the Soviet Union and the United States; without clear-cut enemies, he believed, his people would lose any sense of what Chinese Communism meant. A sharply defined enemy is a far stronger argument for your side than all the words you could possibly put together.

Political tags - such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth - are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.

Of course, the Nazi movement was unique in terms of its killing machines and its policy of rounding up millions of people in order to systematically murder them. Nonetheless, the Nazi form of cultism has close resemblances to that of other political and religious groups, and leaves no doubt about cultist capacities for infinite murderousness.