Ernest Mandel Quotes


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Ideologues often use the tactic of opposing everything the government does—even if they would support it intellectually. The main issue for them was to win the class warfare, and the move to that end by never giving the government credit for anything or sharing power or cooperating in any way. This is not just a tactic of the left. The Tea Party Conservative Republicans adopted the same tactics with the Barack Obama Democratic Administration.


After Roosevelt, most eras of American politics more or less followed the pattern Roosevelt described herein as a “calamity”, with the anger becoming more or less intense. Jefferson thought that these were natural divisions of politics in all societies--{604810}. The thing that masked this for years was race and slavery. In Lincoln’s time there were liberals and conservatives in both parties if race were ignored. In Theodore Roosevelt’s era, he, Taft and others were generally liberal reformers, while a large number of Republicans were conservative supporters of the status quo. Some democrats were radical reformers like William Jennings Bryan while others were arch conservatives. Until 1964 and the Civil Rights Act there were many conservatives in the Democratic Party, but almost all switched to the Republican Party in anger. The Republican conservatives tended to drive the Republican liberals out of the party and for the last part of the 20th century Roosevelt’s “calamity” well described the American political scene, and the anger increased carrying partisan bitterness into the 21st century.


Ernest Mandel
Ernest Mandel
  • Born: April 5, 1923
  • Died: July 20, 1995
  • Nationality: Belgian
  • Profession: Author

Ernest Ezra Mandel (Dutch: [manˈdɛl]; also known by various pseudonyms such as Ernest Germain, Pierre Gousset, Henri Vallin, Walter;, was a Belgian Marxian economist and a Trotskyist activist and theorist. He fought in the underground resistance against the Nazis during the occupation of Belgium.