Daniel De Leon Quotes
Conservatism, by all means, if there is anything worth conserving, and everything not worth losing. Revolution, if there is nothing worth conserving, and everything worth gaining. These are the class lines upon which the political battle is being fought, and is bound to be fought
Daniel DeLeon, 1852-1914, Author and Socialist leader, “Conservatism” The People, October 20, 1895
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What if you are a conservative in a liberal environment? Then what you are conserving is liberalism.
His reference was to his experience as an undergraduate at Dartmouth, which he and associates views as a liberal organization, while others viewed it as a conservative bastion of the establishment.
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.
The Republicans had been badly beaten in the 2012 Presidential Election. Many attributed the loss to the dissatisfaction of the electorate with the Republican ideas which had become more and more conservative in recent decades. Others, like Rubio, wanted to maintain the existing ideas which were very different from the Republican ideas earlier when they won more elections.
Actually, there have been “paranoid” fear of opposition political viewpoints in America very often. In the early days of the Republic, the Federalists main concern was not England or other foreign enemies, but Jefferson’s Democratic Republicans. And those Jeffersonians were absolutely convinced that the greatest danger to America was the Federalists who would bring back a monarchy if they could. The Jacksonians triggered a similar polarization. The Civil War stemmed from this extreme. Even America’s most popular President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was elected to 4 successive terms, was perceived as the major “enemy” of America along with his wife Eleanor and the other New Dealers.
Daniel De Leon (/də ˈliːɒn/; December 14, 1852 – May 11, 1914), alternatively spelt Daniel de León, was a Curaçaoan-American socialist newspaper editor, politician, Marxist theoretician, and trade union organizer. He is regarded as the forefather of the idea of revolutionary industrial unionism and was the leading figure in the Socialist Labor Party of America from 1890 until the time of his death.[2] De Leon was a co-founder of the Industrial Workers of the World and much of his ideas and philosophy contributed to the creations of Socialist Labor parties across the world, including: Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance.
