Alan Ehrenhalt Quotes
Why is machine government a greater affront to democracy than a government of leaderless individualists prone to petty rivalry and endless bickering?
Alan Ehrenhalt, Political Editor, Editor, Governing Magazine, The United States of Ambition
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
With so many revolutionary rulers of new nations suppressing all opposition, the history of Ataturk and Turkey is unique. Ataturk was so popular and his People’s Party so successful that there was no opposition and Turkey had one party rule. However, Ataturk was determined to have Turkey become a parliamentary democracy as good as the Western nations of Europe. So a tradition of multi-party democracy was needed. So Ataturk actually went to his friend Fethi Okyar and asked him to start an opposition party and oppose the government. Fethi was a strong supporter of the revolution and generally was in concurrence with Ataturk and the People’s Party on everything. Ataturk however convinced him that they had to start a tradition that would take Turkey through the future, and he did create a new party-- Serbest Cumhuriyet Fırkası (Liberal Republican Party) and worked hard to find differences with the People’s Party and the Government. One immediate contribution was the oversight that the new party provided—a strong tradition that exists to this day in Turkey.
Madison went on to observe that in a democracy, the real power may reside in the majority of the population, and in such a case the tyranny of the majority is the danger.
“Personal government” meant to him charismatic individuals and demagogues who came to power in a republic and led it into a dictatorship. As opposed to representatives of political parties where a single individual could not control everything. However, this was before Adolf Hitler and his political party—the Nazis—came to power by election and turned Germany into a dictatorship. It takes more than structure to preserve democracy.
Eggleston was an accomplished writer who had served in the Confederate army of the Civil War. 20 year after the war he wrote a series of articles for the prestigious Northern Atlantic Monthly trying to convey the war from the Southerner’s point of view.
