Subtle Democrat Quotes

We should pick our battles carefully, while simultaneously attempting to empathize a bit with the so-called enemy. We should approach the news and media with a healthy dose of skepticism and avoid painting those who disagree with us with a broad brush. We should prioritize values of being honest, fostering transparency, and welcoming doubt over the values of being right, feeling good, and getting revenge. These “democratic” values are harder to maintain amidst the constant noise of a networked world. But we must accept the responsibility and nurture them regardless. The future stability of our political systems may depend on it. There

NOTHING should more deeply shame the modern student than the recency and inadequacy of his acquaintance with India. Here is a vast peninsula of nearly two million square miles; two-thirds as large as the United States, and twenty times the size of its master, Great Britain; 320,000,000 souls, more than in all North and South America combined, or one-fifth of the population of the earth; an impressive continuity of development and civilization from Mohenjo-daro, 2900 B.C. or earlier, to Gandhi, Raman and Tagore; faiths compassing every stage from barbarous idolatry to the most subtle and spiritual pantheism; philosophers playing a thousand variations on one monistic theme from the Upanishads eight centuries before Christ to Shankara eight centuries after him; scientists developing astronomy three thousand years ago, and winning Nobel prizes in our own time; a democratic constitution of untraceable antiquity in the villages, and wise and beneficent rulers like Ashoka and Akbar in the capitals; minstrels singing great epics almost as old as Homer, and poets holding world audiences today; artists raising gigantic temples for Hindu gods from Tibet to Ceylon and from Cambodia to Java, or carving perfect palaces by the score for Mogul kings and queens—this is the India that patient scholarship is now opening up, like a new intellectual continent, to that Western mind which only yesterday thought civilization an exclusively European thing.I

In an absolutism, the autocrat is visible and tangible. The real despotism of republican institutions is far deeper, more insidious, because it rests on the popular delusion of self-government and independence. That is the subtle source of democratic tyranny, and, as such, it cannot be reached with a bullet.

For there is much to do, amounting in fact to a remaking of modern society. All democratic experiments, all revolutions, all demands for equality have so far, in every instance, stopped short of sexual equality. Every society has in its prestige structures a series of subtle, interacting codes of dominance that always, everywhere, finally rank men higher than women. Nowhere has any society successfully dispensed with the age-old sex-role division of labor and the rewards in goods and power that accompany it. Nowhere do women enjoy the rights, privileges, possibilities and leisure time that men do. Everywhere men still mediate between women and power, women and the state, women and freedom, women and themselves.

In his years in prison, Berkman had come to believe that bullets directed at their oppressors were insufficient because eliminating what he viewed as the representatives of modern slavery didn’t resolve the problem. “The real despotism of republican institutions,” he wrote Goldman, “is far deeper, more insidious, because it rests on the popular delusion of self-government and independent. That is the subtle source of democratic tyranny and, as such, it cannot be reached with a bullet.

Stigmatizing the millions of Italians as ‘consenting victims’ of Berlusconi, denouncing the stupidity of the masses and wrapping oneself in the flag of the divine Left and its democratic arrogance – this is the pose of the enlightened intellectual, who is prepared to leave his country as a punishment (though he does not do so). All this comes from a short-sighted, conventional analysis of political Reason. The ‘blind’ masses, for their part, have a more subtle – perhaps transpolitical(?) – vision, to the effect that the locus of power is empty, corrupt and hopeless and that, logically, one has to fill it with a man who has the same profile – an empty, comical, histrionic, phoney individual who embodies the situation ideally: Berlusconi.(...) But it is just as undeniable that we cannot bear either Berlusconi or the current state of affairs. We have, therefore, to take into account both the obvious fact that we have the system we deserve and the equally nonnegligible fact that we cannot bear it.

Similarly at the Washington Post in 2005, one of the paper’s editors, Marie Arana, wrote “The elephant in the newsroom is our narrowness. Too often, we wear liberalism on our sleeve and are intolerant of other lifestyles and opinions. . . . We’re not very subtle about it at this paper: If you work here, you must be one of us. You must be liberal, progressive, a Democrat.” She added, “I’ve been in communal gatherings in the Post, watching election returns, and have been flabbergasted to see my colleagues cheer unabashedly for the Democrats.

Fabrication of necessary illusions for social management is as old as history. But in the democratic system, the necessary illusions cannot be imposed by force. Rather they must be instilled in the public mind by more subtle means. A totalitarian state can be satisfied with lesser degrees of allegiance to required truths. It is sufficient that people obey. What they think is a secondary concern. But in a democratic political order, there's always the danger that an independent thought might be translated into political action. So it is important to eliminate the threat at its root.

We should pick our battles carefully, while simultaneously attempting to empathize a bit with the so-called enemy. We should approach the news and media with a healthy dose of skepticism and avoid painting those who disagree with us with a broad brush. We should prioritize values of being honest, fostering transparency, and welcoming doubt over the values of being right, feeling good, and getting revenge. These “democratic” values are harder to maintain amidst the constant noise of a networked world. But we must accept the responsibility and nurture them regardless. The future stability of our political systems may depend on it.

All democratic experiments, all revolutions, all demands for equality have so far, in every instance, stopped short of sexual equality. Every society has in its prestige structures a series of subtle, interacting codes of dominance that always, everywhere, finally rank men higher than women. Nowhere has any society successfully dispensed with the age-old sex-role division of labor and the rewards in goods and power that accompany it. Nowhere do women enjoy the rights, privileges and possibilities and leisure time that men do. Everywhere men still mediate between women and power, women and the state, women and freedom, women and themselves.

The more serious about gardening I became, the more dubious lawns seemed. The problem for me was not, as it was for my father, the relation to my neighbors that a lawn implied; it was the lawn’s relationship to nature. For however democratic a lawn may be with respect to one’s neighbors, with respect to nature it is authoritarian. Under the mower’s brutal indiscriminate rotor, the landscape is subdued, homogenized, dominated utterly. I became convinced that lawn care had about as much to do with gardening as floor waxing, or road paving. Gardening was a subtle process of give and take with the landscape, a search for some middle ground between culture and nature. A lawn was nature under culture’s boot. Mowing the lawn, I felt like I was battling the earth rather than working it; each week it sent forth a green army and each week I beat it back with my infernal machine. Unlike every other plant in my garden, the grasses were anonymous, massified, deprived of any change or development whatsoever, not to mention any semblance of self-determination. I ruled a totalitarian landscape. Hot monotonous hours behind the mower gave rise to existential speculations. I spent part of one afternoon trying to decide who, in the absurdist drama of lawn mowing, was Sisyphus. Me? A case could certainly be made. Or was it the grass, pushing up through the soil every week, one layer of cells at a time, only to be cut down and then, perversely, encouraged (with fertilizer, lime, etc.) to start the whole doomed process over again? Another day it occurred to me that time as we know it doesn’t exist in the lawn, since grass never dies or is allowed to flower and set seed. Lawns are nature purged of sex and death. No wonder Americans like them so much.

Donald Trump is rape culture's blathering id, and just a few days after the Access Hollywood tape dropped, then Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton (who, no doubt, has just as many man-made scars as the rest of us) was required to stand next to him on a stage for a presidential debate and remain unflappable while being held to an astronomically higher standard and pretend that he was her equal while his followers persisted in howling that sexism is a feminist myth. While Trump bragged about sexual assault and vowed to suppress disobedient media, cable news pundits spent their time taking a protractor to Clinton's smile - a constant, churning microanalysis of nothing, a subtle subversion of democracy that they are poised to repeat in 2020. And then she lost. (Actually, in a particularly painful living metaphor, she won, but because of institutional peculiarities put in place by long-dead white men, they took it from her and gave it to the man with fewer votes.

All democratic experiments, all revolutions, all demands for equality have so far, in every instance, stopped short of sexual equality. Every society has in its prestige structures a series of subtle, interacting codes of dominance that always, everywhere, finally rank men higher than women.

Rather than combating the irrationality of the charges of softness on Communism and subversion, the Truman Administration, sure that it was the lesser of two evils, moved to expropriate the issue, as in a more subtle way it was already doing in foreign affairs. So the issue was legitimized; rather than being the property of the far right, which the centrist Republicans tolerated for obvious political benefits, it had even been picked up by the incumbent Democratic party.

This type of socialism is wildly popular in American society today and seems palatable to the masses because of the word democratic, which is merely one of the hooks, an example of terms employed by democratic socialists to appear innocuous. However, this type of socialism is no less destructive than the Marxist worldview from which it springs. Though it sounds nice and friendly with its “power to the people” message, this rhetoric is a subtle idea that traces right back to communism. In reality, the power is extracted from the people and given to the state. But this happens so deceptively that at the point at which people recognize they’re in peril, it’s already too late.

But part of living in a democracy and a free society is that we all have to deal with views and people we don’t necessarily like. That’s simply the price we pay—you could even say it’s the whole point of the system. And it seems more and more people are forgetting that. We should pick our battles carefully, while simultaneously attempting to empathize a bit with the so-called enemy. We should approach the news and media with a healthy dose of skepticism and avoid painting those who disagree with us with a broad brush. We should prioritize values of being honest, fostering transparency, and welcoming doubt over the values of being right, feeling good, and getting revenge. These “democratic” values are harder to maintain amidst the constant noise of a networked world. But we must accept the responsibility and nurture them regardless. The future stability of our political systems may depend on it.

We should prioritize values of being honest, fostering transparency, and welcoming doubt over the values of being right, feeling good, and getting revenge. These “democratic” values are harder to maintain amidst the constant noise of a networked world. But we must accept the responsibility and nurture them regardless. The future stability of our political systems may depend on it.

We should prioritize values of being honest, fostering transparency, and welcoming doubt over the values of being right, feeling good, and getting revenge. These “democratic” values are harder to maintain amidst the constant noise of a networked world. But we must accept the responsibility and nurture them regardless.

So we need to be subtle—congenial yet cunning, democratic yet devious.

Crime and welfare were the major themes of Reagan’s campaign rhetoric. According to the Edsalls, one of Reagan’s favorite and most-often-repeated anecdotes was the story of a Chicago “welfare queen” with “80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards,” whose “tax-free income alone is over $150,000.”68 The term welfare queen became a not-so-subtle code for “lazy, greedy, black ghetto mother.” The food stamp program, in turn, was a vehicle to let “some fellow ahead of you buy a T-bone steak,” while “you were standing in a checkout line with your package of hamburger.”69 These highly racialized appeals, targeted to poor and working-class whites, were nearly always accompanied by vehement promises to be tougher on crime and to enhance the federal government’s role in combating it. Reagan portrayed the criminal as “a staring face—a face that belongs to a frightening reality of our time: the face of the human predator.”70 Reagan’s racially coded rhetoric and strategy proved extraordinarily effective, as 22 percent of all Democrats defected from the party to vote for Reagan. The defection rate shot up to 34 percent among those Democrats who believed civil rights leaders were pushing “too fast.”71

We should approach the news and media with a healthy dose of skepticism and avoid painting those who disagree with us with a broad brush. We should prioritize values of being honest, fostering transparency, and welcoming doubt over the values of being right, feeling good, and getting revenge. These “democratic” values are harder to maintain amidst the constant noise of a networked world. But we must accept the responsibility and nurture them regardless. The future stability of our political systems may depend on it.

Warren Weaver, a New York Times journalist who reviewed the book upon its release, observed that Phillips’s strategy largely depended upon creating and maintaining a racially polarized political environment. “Full racial polarization is an essential ingredient of Phillips’s political pragmatism. He wants to see a black Democratic party, particularly in the South, because this will drive into the Republican party precisely the kind of anti-Negro whites who will help constitute the emerging majority. This even leads him to support some civil rights efforts.”56 Appealing to the racism and vulnerability of working-class whites had worked to defeat the Populists at the turn of the century, and a growing number of conservatives believed the tactic should be employed again, albeit in a more subtle fashion.

How’s it going?” People have not always greeted each other in this way: they invoked divine protection for themselves, and they did not bow before a commoner the way they bowed before a nobleman. In order for the formula “How’s it going?” to appear, we had to leave the feudal world and enter the democratic era, which presupposes a minimal degree of equality between individuals, subject to oscillations in their moods. According to one legend, the French expression “ça va?” is of medical origin: how do you defecate? A vestige of a time when intestinal regularity was seen as a sign of good health. This lapidary, standardized formality corresponds to the principle of economy and constitutes the minimal social bond in a mass society that seeks to include people from all over. But it is sometimes less a routine than a way of intimating something: we want to force the person met to situate himself, we want to petrify him, subject him to a detailed examination. What are you up to? What’s happened to you? A discreet summons that commands everyone to expose himself for what he really is. In a world that makes movement a canonical value, there is an interest in how things are going, even if we don’t know where. That’s why a “how’s it going?” that expects no answer is more human than one that is full of concern but wants to strip you bare and force you to give a moral accounting for yourself. This is because the fact of being is no longer taken for granted, and we have to pay permanent attention to our internal barometers. Are things going as well as I say, or am I embellishing them? That is why many people evade the question and move to another topic, assuming that the interlocutor is perceptive enough to discern in their “fine” a discreet depression. Then there is this terrible expression of renunciation: “Okay, I guess,” as if one had to let the days and hours pass without taking part in them. But why, after all, do things have to be going well? Asked daily to justify ourselves, it often happens that we are so opaque to ourselves that the answer no longer has any meaning other than as a formality. “You’re looking good today.” Flowing over us like honey, this compliment has the effect of a kind of consecration: in the confrontation between the radiant and the grouchy, I am on the right side. And now I am, through a bit of verbal magic, raised to the summit of a subtle and ever-changing hierarchy. But the following day another, ruthless verdict is handed down: “You look terrible today.” This observation executes me at point-blank range, deprives me of the splendid position where I thought I had taken up permanent residence. I have not proven worthy of the caste of the magnificent, I am a pariah and have to slink along walls, trying to conceal the fact that I look ill. Ultimately, “how’s it going?” is the most futile and the most profound of questions. To answer it precisely, one would have to make a scrupulous inventory of one’s psyche, considering each aspect in detail. No matter: we have to say “fine” out of politeness and civility and change the subject, or else ruminate the question during our whole lives and reserve our reply for afterward.

it is dangerous to seem too power hungry, to be overt with your power moves. We have to seem fair and decent. So we need to be subtle—congenial yet cunning, democratic yet devious.