"The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one perhaps of the Right, and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can 'throw the rascals out' at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy... But either party in office becomes in time corrupt, tired, unenterprising, and vigorless. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party, which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same policies".
-- Carroll Quigley, "Tragedy and Hope", 1966, p. 1247-48
Bill Clinton was known to have stated that Carroll Quigley was one of his mentors.
1 comment:
fukkin' a! I've never heard of Carroll Quigley but the quote is something that is what I've concluded as a life-long observer of American federal politics. Two headed beast.
The heads eat slightly different diets, but the same stomach digests the food, the same GI tract processes it, the same cloaca expels the waste products.
All those damned dragons in old mythology, they're all metaphoric for government or other organized power, eh?
++++++++
You familiar with this cat here?--
http://www.last.fm/music/Michael+Albert/+wiki
I just watched a pretty interesting segment of a video that has Albert doing a little storytelling on his book tour. He tells some interesting stories about his MIT hazing and the differences among MIT, BU and Harvard -- and how those differences reflect cultural differences at those schools, and how the cultural differences are intentional because of the types of graduates each place is trying to produce. All of it rang pretty true for me, a lot of it confirmed by my former life in the corporate and insurance worlds.
The Albert video --
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3622753371052484817&hl=en
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