Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes
A sect or party is an elegant incognito devised to save a man from the vexation of thinking.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803-1882, Poet & Essayist, Journal, 1831
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1st Earl of Beaconsfield
He was providing historical perspective to the 2016 Republican Party split in which nativism and anti-immigration was a major factor.
The loyalty and sometimes hypocrisy that is often called for by political parties tends to be offensive to people of serious thought and intellect. However, America has developed two major political parties which while from time to time tend to lock-step obedience, over time tolerate wide diversity and there are few areas in which there can be a party loyalty test. In nations where there are many parties each can be very well-defined and narrow, while if essentially only two, they must have broad tents in order to win. Thinkers are more comfortable in that kind of party.
Every sect of Russian communism had an offshoot in America and in other countries as well. When bad blood broke out between sects in Russia, the battle spread to the rest of the world as when Leon Trotsky was assassinated by Stalinists in Mexico and the Trotskyites were viciously and physically attacked here in America. In many cases there was little ideological difference but the split reflected different leadership styles and personalities. Despite Frank’s warning, American communism was a mirror reflection of Russia until Stalin negotiated the WWII pact with Hitler, when anti-Stalin Communists began to be active, and because America was a more open society, American communists were ahead of their Russian comrades in denouncing Stalinism.
Opposition to the Bolsheviks
Of the different kinds of political parties, the one that was formed on principles was at that time a new notion. Hume was particularly skeptical of those as the tended not to be as amenable to compromise as parties unified by simple vested material interests.
Before that both parties had liberals and conservatives in profusion. Many of the Democatic Party positions were very conservative. Roosevelt wanted the party to become the liberal and left wing policy. He was able to make the party economically liberal, but the worst of America’s racists were all Democrats at the time and stayed with the Democratic Party led the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Bill of 1963. The Republican Party then created a home for the racist Southern Democrats, who left the Democratic Party in anger.
Essentially Trollope claimed that English political parties are by their very nature, conservative, in the sense that they tend to resist great change. This has tended to be true in America and other democracies, but there are a number of exceptions. Where political parties are totally unsuccessful, they have little to lose. Likewise, when a political party becomes overwhelmingly dominant, it tends to overreach and try and make ideological change. However when there is true contest among the parties, they tend to be conservative in the sense that even if they are liberal parties, they do not move in extreme ways.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, who went by his middle name Waldo, was an American essayist, lecturer, philosopher, abolitionist and poet who led the transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States.
