Richard Hofstadter Quotes
When a third party's demands become popular enough, they are appropriated by one or both of the major parties and the third party disappears. Third parties are like bees: Once they have stung, they die.
Richard Hofstadter, 1916-1970, Historian, The Age of Reform, Vintage 1955
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The press secretary found the President very morose the day after his great triumph of passing the Civil Rights Bill of 1964. Moyers asked why he looked so sad.
It is noteworthy that women did not at the time even have the vote, but were still politically active.
The Republicans lost the Congressional election of 2006. See {616069}.
Early political philosophers were very concerned about the conflicts that would be engendered in society by political parties. Many of the Founding Fathers had similar suspicions.
In 2010 there was a very conservative populist movement that not only took a very right wing position for traditional Republicans, but attracted many of the racists, Nazis, and extreme fringe movements that embarrassed many of the Tea Party members who, because it was a movement and not a disciplined party hierarchy, claimed that they could not be responsible for the hateful signs and slogans of a minority of people who would show up at a Tea Party rally. At the same time, the Tea Party endorsed some candidates who were not very well vetted and were so extreme or quirky (one had been into witchcraft) that orthodox Republicans didn’t want to be associated with them. The moderate Republicans especially were placed in an awkward position as some of the Tea Party candidates unseated incumbent Republicans in primary elections and then some made very weak candidates in the general elections while others were more successful. Palin, already at the populist and quirky wing of the Republican Party warned and threatened the moderates.
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.
Richard Hofstadter was an American historian and public intellectual of the mid-20th century.
