A Quote by Jonathan Rauch

Parties and political systems used to be about excluding renegades who would never play well with others in government. Now it's actually systematically screening them in. — © Jonathan Rauch
Parties and political systems used to be about excluding renegades who would never play well with others in government. Now it's actually systematically screening them in.
The people who started the American government, the founders of the Constitution, didn't like political parties but they were forced to start them. Nobody ever created political parties in England, they evolved. And there do tend to be two general tendencies that focus around how much government you think you need.
What we have done over the last 40 or 50 years is systematically attacked and weakened the parties, the political machines, the professionals, and insiders, and hacks, and all the tools that they use to get politicians to play well together. And with those gone, you get chaos.
Actually, I never thought of me being president of Brazil. First of all, I'm not a politician. I never have been, and I think I'm a very unlikely person for this kind of job because of my frankness. I've never dealt with political parties. I have no connections with political parties. So, I don't think so.
Political renegades always start their career of treachery as 'the best men of all parties' and end up in the Tory knackery.
Some people advocate public nomination and a three-track system - allowing voters and political parties to make nominations along with the committee. These people do not want any screening of candidates, but they have not clearly defined the concept of 'screening.'
Growing up in Egypt, I never saw the country as divided as it is today. We now have two main political groupings: the Islamist parties and the civil, or liberal, political parties.
It's easy to talk about our system not functioning. It's actually functioning exactly the way we've designed it to function by giving so much power to the political parties, which all of our, you know, leading founders - Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison - all said don't create political parties like the ones we have now. We did it, and we're paying a very high price for it.
I do not support the third party movement anymore. I now advocate the abolishment of all political parties. We've allowed the parties to take over the government.
Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well. Well, he would not have to fail at trying to write them either. Maybe you could never write them, and that was why you put them off and delayed the starting. Well he would never know, now.
It appears it would be quite un-American not to be suspicious of the government or to distrust it. History has taught them a little too much about the tragic frailties of human governments, but it has also driven home to them that they must control firmly political and economic power, which, handed over to any government in their land, could be easily used to oppress them.
We all agree that neither the Government nor political parties ought to interfere with religious sects. It is equally true that religious sects ought not to interfere with the Government or with political parties. We believe that the cause of good government and the cause of religion both suffer by all such interference.
Our government does not exist to decide the rights, nor to grant them. Our government exists to protect them. And that is why we have a constitution that limits the power of the federal government to a few specific, but important things and we have abandoned that. We have abandoned it in both political parties.
We now have political chaos. We've got parties in Ireland saying they want to merge with Northern Ireland. You've got parties in Scotland saying you want to leave the U.K. You've got the Spanish government saying it would like to take ownership of Gibraltar, which is a British overseas territory... So just the politics of this is a mess.
Thus far, both political parties have been remarkably clever and effective in concealing this new reality. In fact, the two parties have formed an innovative kind of cartel—an arrangement I have termed America’s political duopoly. Both parties lie about the fact that they have each sold out to the financial sector and the wealthy. So far both have largely gotten away with the lie, helped in part by the enormous amount of money now spent on deceptive, manipulative political advertising.
We have a democracy of elections to elections. After winning an election, the parties become brazen and arrogant. They would do all wrong things and if you question them, they would say - why don't you change the government next time? But that would be five years later. What do I do right now? I am suffering right now.
The Constitution never even mentions political parties, let alone the Republican and Democratic parties, yet all the election laws help to protect them from competition.
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