Quotations

from the book

The Paradox of American Democracy

by John B. Judis

Routledge Press, 2001, paper

POAD

Quotations

p4
[A] school of thought, composed of populists and Marxists, held that important government decisions were shaped and then made by a small, interlocking group of business, political, and military leaders who prevailed regardless of who won elections. Populists described this group as a "power elite" or "establishment" and Marxists called it a "ruling class."

p12
Political scientist E. Pendelton Herring in I929

"The men who seek special favors of Congress rely almost exclusively upon the manipulation of public sentiment.... they attempt to make the legislators think that the thing they want is the thing the public wants."

p15
University of California sociologist G. William Domhoff

" the corporate elite . . . form the controlling core of the power elite. The interests and unity of the power elite [C. Wright Mills] are thus determined primarily by the interests of the corporate rich."

[Domhoff described how Mills's power elite actually influenced legislation and politics through forming policy groups, think tanks, and foundations.]

p44
Businessman Roger Babson in 1921

"The war [WW I] taught us the power of propaganda. Now when we have anything to sell to the American people, we know how to sell it. We have the school, the pulpit and the press."

p49
Felix Frankfurter 1929

Perhaps the dominant feeling about government today is distrust.

p49
Walter Lippmann in 1927:

There are no parties, there are no leaders, there are no issues.... The questions which really engage the emotion of the masses of the people are of a quite different order. They manifest themselves in the controversies over prohibition, the Ku Klux Klan, Romanism, Fundamentalism, immigration. These, rather than the tariff, taxation, credit and corporate control, are the issues which divide the American people.

p51
The crash and the Depression destroyed in one stroke the edifice of wisdom and invincibility that businessmen had erected for themselves.

p51
Gerald Johnson in 1932

It will be many a long day before Americans of the middle class will listen with anything approaching the reverence they felt in 1928 whenever a magnate of business speaks.

p51
Senator Burton Wheeler at Congressional hearings, told Charles Mitchell of the National City Bank

The best way to restore confidence in the banks would be to take thes crooked presidents out of the banks and treat them the same way as we treated Al Capone when he failed to pay his income tax.

p52
Historian Charles Beard wrote in 193l

The cold truth is that the individualist creed of everybody for himself and the devil take the hindmost is principally responsible for the distress in which Western civilization finds itself.

p65
the New Deal had made the federal government responsible for the welfare of its citizens-for their employment and for their security in old age.

p180
Reagan's victory and his first term did decisively tilt American politics away from the liberal spirit of the sixties and from the model of democratic pluralism that the New Deal had established. It also witnessed the consolidation on K Street of a new power base in American politics.

p181
Beginning in the early I970s, business leaders, bankers, and lobbyists in Washington had united against what they believed to be a revolutionary threat from the labor, consumer, and environmental movements.

p181
In 1979 the trade deficit had largely been brought about by oil imports. By 1987, more than half the deficit was in manufactured goods from Japan (s57 billion) and Western Europe ($27.5 billion), while the deficit with OPEC countries was only $13.7 billion.

p189
The new right political strategy depended upon working-class Democrats subordinating their broader economic populism to concerns about gun control, abortion, racial integration, affirmative action, high taxes (for the wealthy as well as the working class), and the threat of Communism.

p201
The Reagan years and the business counteroffensive also left their mark on popular sentiment toward reform. In 1964, on the eve of the Great Society, 76 percent of Americans said they could "trust the government in Washington to do what is right" either "most of the time" or "just about always." By 1992, this percentage had fallen to 29 percent.

p219
Gingrich sought to marshal K Street lobbies and his fellow Republicans behind a strategy of gutting the Second Wave programs of the New Deal, the Great Society, and the regulatory reforms of the Nixon era.

p229
[By the late 1990s] the political system was dysfunctional. It continued to be dominated by lobbyists and irresponsible elites backed by conservative Republicans. Their presence on Washington's K Street discouraged reform and discouraged active public participation in politics.

p230
Between 1989 and 1997, the share of wealth held by the top 1 percent grew from 37.4 to 39.1 percent of the national income, while the share held by middle-class families-those in the middle fifth-fell from 4.8 to 4.4 percent. More than 85 percent of the benefits from the increase in stock prices between 1989 and I997 went to the richest I0 percent of households. From I989 to I997, CEO salaries went from 56 times to I I6 times that of the average worker. The economy of the I990s was much more like that of the I920s, when the benefits of growth were distributed unequally, than like the halcyon I950s and I960s when the gap between rich and poor visibly narrowed.

p233
The Progressive Era was characterized by a lively and politically mobilized citizenry-evidenced not merely by voting, but by participation in political movements and in organizations on a local, state, and national level. There were viable third parties and fourth parties, two national labor organizations, farm groups, business groups, and a broad-based movement for woman suffrage. Party rivalry was based partly on region and religion, but in the elections of I896 and I9I2, the parties represented farreaching democratic alternatives. The election of I9I2, in which Theodore Roosevelt's Progressive Party and Eugene Debs's Socialist Party challenged the Republican and Democratic regulars, was fought over the terms of reform, and laid the basis for Wilson's climactic first term.

p237
Herb Stein [economist] who had worked with the Committee on Economic Development

I think there was a period when there were businessmen outside the government who had some authority and who were respected, and who had a genuine national patriotic concern with the problems of the country. I can't think of a single name now of such a person.

p255
In I995, DLC economist Robert Shapiro estimated that eliminating unnecessary [corporate subsidies] could save taxpayers $265 billion in five years.

p258
Americans' sense of mission has been threatened by narcissism and selfish individualism and by the narrow moralism of the religious right. Contemporary Americans seek either wealth or moral perfection. This new schizophrenia of spirit has been well represented by Representative Tom DeLay and the "young Turks" of the Republican House, who walk along the corridors of the Capitol with a check from a corporate political action committee in one hand and a Bible in the other and who find it unthinkable that the country should expend its considerable resources on ending poverty at home or combating tyranny abroad.

Paradox of American Democracy

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