1/ "At the so-called grassroots of American politics there is a wide and pervasive tendency to believe that there is some great but essentially very simple struggle going on, at the heart of which there lies some single conspiratorial force, whether it be the force represented...
2/ ...by the “gold bugs,” the Catholic Church, big business, corrupt politicians, the saloons, or the Communist Party, and that this evil is something that must be not merely limited, checked, and controlled, but rather extirpated root and branch at the earliest possible moment.
3/ All too often the assumption prevails among our politicians and intellectual leaders that the judgment of the people about such things must of necessity be right and ... to pretend that these demands are altogether sensible and to try to find ways to placate them.
4/ So we go off on periodical psychic sprees that purport to be moral crusades: liberate the people once and for all from the gold bugs, restore absolute popular democracy or completely honest competition in business, wipe out the saloon & liquor forever from the nation’s life...
5/ ... , destroy the political machines and put an end to corruption, or achieve absolute, total, and final security against war, espionage, and the affairs of the external world. The people who attach themselves to these several absolutisms are not always the same people, but...
6/ ...they do create for each other a common climate of absolutist enthusiasm. — Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform (1955)
