Robertson Davies Quotes
Their very conservatism is secondhand, and they don't know what they are conserving.
Davies, Robertson. The Rebel Angels. Macmillan of Canada, 1981.
Democracy and a republican form of government ran counter to the Chinese customs and failed, with Yuan Shikai taking all power—the “immemorial custom” of the autocratic Mancho and earlier Chinese dynasties. This failure of republican government in China so colored the future Chinese political leadership that both the Communists and Chang’s Kuomintang Nationalist anti-communists were both dictatorial and autocratic with great power lying in military hands. It was only in the later years of the 20th century that the Nationalists began to have a real democracy and although the Communists became avid capitalists and loosened up in terms of economic freedom, they did not feel the Chinese masses were ready to accept anything but the authoritarian political system that was the Chinese “immemorial custom”. They would not risk another collapse of modern government and all the factions fighting for control as in the Republic failure.
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.
William Robertson Davies CC OOnt FRSL FRSC was a Canadian novelist, playwright, critic, journalist, and professor. He was one of Canada's best known and most popular authors and one of its most distinguished "men of letters", an unfashionable term Davies gladly accepted for himself. Davies was the founding Master of Massey College, a graduate residential college associated with the University of Toronto.
