Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ

Joshua Rosenblum > Joshua Rosenblum's Quotes

Showing 1-30 of 169
« previous 1 3 4 5 6
sort by

  • #1
    James Madison
    “Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression. In our Governments, the real power lies in the majority of the Community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from the acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the constituents.”
    James Madison, Letters and Other Writings of James Madison Volume 3

  • #2
    William Voegeli
    “No one, that is, finds it necessary to inquire about the effects of childhood deprivations and historical grievances when passing judgment on Wall Street carnivores or white supremacists. This command leaves liberals, sure they must not be too sure they’re right, conflicted when figuring out how to be tolerant of the intolerant, as when non-Western cultures oppress women and ethnic or religious minorities. It also means practitioners of the politics of kindness lose little sleep over those whose suffering is the collateral damage of liberal policies, such as whites denied educational or career opportunities because of affirmative action programs.”
    William Voegeli, The Pity Party: A Mean-Spirited Diatribe Against Liberal Compassion

  • #3
    William Voegeli
    “At the time when St. Francis impulsively gave his fine clothes to a beggar, nobody seems to have been very interested in what happened to the beggar. Was he rehabilitated? Did he open a small business? Or was he to be found the next day, naked again, in an Assisi gutter, having traded the clothes for a flagon of Orvieto?”
    William Voegeli, The Pity Party: A Mean-Spirited Diatribe Against Liberal Compassion

  • #4
    Francis Fukuyama
    “When testifying before a senate committee investigating his behavior, he said, “I got that patronage from the sheriff, the county clerk, the county treasurer, all the clerks of the different courts, the State administration â€� It rarely happened â€� that any appointments of any kind, big or little, were made in the section of the city in which I lived without my recommendation.â€� Lorimer also owned a number of businesses that did contracting for the city, and through a process of what he suggested was “honest graftâ€� managed to accumulate considerable wealth. His machine, like those in other cities, catered to the interests of the huge number of immigrants and working-class voters who were flocking into the city to work in its new industries.”
    Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy

  • #5
    Francis Fukuyama
    “These groups began agitating against corruption through reports and publicity about the backgrounds of candidates published in sympathetic newspapers; they sought to professionalize government by making it nonpartisan. Ironically, while this group spoke in the name of democracy, it actually represented the upper crust of Chicago society, an overwhelmingly Protestant group that looked down on the way that Lorimer was empowering the city’s new Catholic and Jewish immigrants.”
    Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy

  • #6
    Francis Fukuyama
    “Lorimer for his part was contemptuous of the municipal reformers, calling them hypocrites who were using the reform cause as a means of increasing their own power and influence.”
    Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy

  • #7
    Francis Fukuyama
    “The fact that La Follette had to use machine tactics to beat the machine suggests that machines themselves are in some way intrinsic to politics—that is, all political leaders must assemble coalitions whose members do not always share the same goals, and must often be brought along with bribery, inducements, threats, and argument.”
    Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy

  • #8
    Francis Fukuyama
    “This professional class had an elevated view of its own status and importance, and tended to resent the fact that the bosses controlling municipal politics were cruder and less educated than they were. They were also taxpayers who didn’t like the fact that their hard-earned dollars were going into the pockets of machine politicians.”
    Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy

  • #9
    Francis Fukuyama
    “The organization of public-sector unions and the emergence of merit employees as a powerful interest group underscores one of the great inherent dilemmas of bureaucratic autonomy. On the one hand, the merit system was created to protect public employees from patronage and the excessive politicization of the bureaucracy. On the other hand, those same protective rules could be used to shield bureaucrats from accountability, making them hard to fire when they failed to perform. Bureaucratic autonomy could lead to high-quality government with public officials looking to the public good. It could also protect bureaucratic self-interest in job security and pay.”
    Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy

  • #10
    Francis Fukuyama
    “Today, these same public-sector unions have themselves become part of an elite that uses the political system to protect its own self-interests. As we will see in Part IV, the quality of American public administration has declined markedly since the 1970s, in no small measure because of these unionsâ€� ability to limit merit as a basis for hiring and promotion. They are an integral part of the contemporary Democratic Party’s political base, making most Democratic politicians loath to challenge them. The result is political decay.”
    Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy

  • #11
    Francis Fukuyama
    “Under these circumstances, revenue from the New World in the form of exports of gold and silver was critical. The Spanish government, however, imposed strict rules limiting economic exchange—a system known as mercantilism—under the mistaken belief that this would maximize its income from the colonies. Exports from the New World could go only to Spain, indeed, to a single port in Spain; they were required to travel in Spanish ships; and the colonies were not permitted to compete with Spanish producers of manufactured goods. Mercantilism, as Adam Smith was to demonstrate in The Wealth of Nations, created huge inefficiencies and was highly detrimental to economic growth. It also had very significant political consequences: access to markets and the right to make productive economic investments were limited to individuals or corporations favored by the state. This meant that the route to personal wealth lay through the state and through gaining political influence. This then led to a rentier rather than an entrepreneurial mentality, in which energy was spent seeking political favor rather than initiating new enterprises that would create wealth. The landowning and merchant classes that emerged under this system grew rich because of the political protection they received from the state.”
    Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy

  • #12
    Francis Fukuyama
    “In the succeeding two centuries, however, some countries evolved in a very different direction. Prussia, Denmark, the Netherlands, Britain, and other European countries followed France in the development of centralized bureaucracies organized along Weberian lines. The French Revolution had, moreover, unleashed not just demands for popular political participation but also a new form of identity by which a shared language and culture would be the central source of unity for the new democratic public. This phenomenon, known as nationalism, then prompted the redrawing of the political map of Europe as dynastic states linked by marriage and feudal obligations were replaced by ones based on a principle of ethnolinguistic solidarity. The levée en masse of the French Revolution represented the first coming together of all these trends: the revolutionary government in Paris was able to mobilize a significant part of the available able-bodied male population to defend France. Under Napoleon, this mobilized expression of state power went on to conquer much of the rest of Europe.”
    Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy

  • #13
    Francis Fukuyama
    “So why did strong, modern states not emerge in Latin America as they did in Europe? If there is a single factor that explains this outcome, it is the relative absence of interstate war in the New World. We have seen how central war and preparation for war were in the creation of modern states in China, Prussia, and France. Even in the United States, state building has been driven by national security concerns throughout the twentieth century. Though Europe has been remarkably peaceful since 1945, the prior centuries were characterized by high and endemic levels of interstate violence. Over the past two centuries, the major political acts that reconfigured the map of Europe—the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, and the wars of unification of Italy and Germany—all involved high levels of violence, culminating in the two world wars of the twentieth century. There has been plenty of violence in Latin America, of course: today the region is infested with drug cartels, street gangs, and a few remaining guerrilla groups, all of which inflict enormous sufferings on local populations. But in comparison with Europe, Latin America has been a peaceful place in terms of interstate war. This has been a blessing for the region, but it has also left a problematic institutional legacy.”
    Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy

  • #14
    Francis Fukuyama
    “The local Creole elites came to support independence in Mexico and Peru only because Ferdinand VII back in Spain agreed to accept the liberal constitution of 1812; independence for them was thus meant to prevent liberal reform from spreading to the New World.2 The makers of the American Revolution, by contrast, were liberal and democratic to the core. Independence from Britain served to embed democratic principles in the institutions of the new nation, even if it did not bring about a social revolution. The leaders of the independence movements in Latin America were far more conservative, despite the fact that they felt compelled to adopt formally democratic institutions.”
    Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy

  • #15
    Francis Fukuyama
    “Interstate wars in Latin America have been so infrequent and politically unimportant that many major surveys of Latin American history barely cover them. Compared to Europe and ancient China, or indeed North America, war had a marginal effect on state building. Charles Tilly’s aphorism “war made the state, and the state made warâ€� remains true, but begs the question of why wars are more prevalent in some regions than in others.”
    Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy

  • #16
    Francis Fukuyama
    “Nonetheless, the lower intensity of interstate war in Latin America did lead to some familiar outcomes. There was much less competitive pressure to consolidate strong national bureaucracies along French-Prussian lines prior to the arrival of mass political participation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This meant that when the franchise was opened up in the early twentieth century, there was no “absolutist coalitionâ€� in place to protect the autonomy of national bureaucracies. The spread of democratic political competition created huge incentives in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and other countries for democratic politicians to use clientelistic methods to recruit voters, and consequently to turn public administration into a piggy bank for political appointments. With the partial exceptions of Chile and Uruguay, countries in Latin America followed the paths of Greece and southern Italy and transformed nineteenth-century patronage politics into full-blown twentieth-century clientelism.”
    Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy

  • #17
    Francis Fukuyama
    “In Europe, demands for expanded popular participation came on the heels of war; the rise of the British Labour Party in the 1920s, for example, was in some ways a consequence of the sufferings of the working class in the trenches of World War I. In Latin America, by contrast, elites usually pulled back from interstate conflicts precisely to avoid having to turn to the masses for help.”
    Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy

  • #18
    Francis Fukuyama
    “As a result of their own experience in a country with historical social mobility, American policy makers are often blind to deeply embedded social stratifications that characterize other societies. The only successful political revolution in the western hemisphere that also resulted in a social revolution was that of Fidel Castro’s Cuba in 1959, a revolution that the United States spent the next fifty-plus years trying to contain or reverse.”
    Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy

  • #19
    Francis Fukuyama
    “Should we then regret the fact that Latin America has not seen more violence over the past two centuries, either in the form of massive interstate wars or social revolutions? It goes without saying that the social revolutions that occurred in Europe and Asia were purchased at enormous cost: tens of millions of people killed in purges, executions, and military conflict, and hundreds of millions more displaced, incarcerated, starved to death, or tortured. Political violence, moreover, oftentimes begets only more political violence rather than progressive social change. We would not want to “give war a chanceâ€� in Latin America any more than in other parts of the world. These observations should not blind us, however, to the fact that just outcomes in the present are often the result, as Machiavelli noted, of crimes committed in the past.   18 THE CLEAN SLATE Exceptions to the materialist account of institutions in Latin America; why Costa Rica didn’t become a “banana republicâ€�; why Argentina should have looked”
    Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy

  • #20
    Francis Fukuyama
    “The explosion of opportunities for litigation gave access and therefore power to many formerly excluded groups, beginning with African Americans. For this reason, litigation and the right to sue has been jealously guarded by many on the progressive left. But it also entailed large costs in terms of the quality of public policy.”
    Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy

  • #21
    Francis Fukuyama
    “When used as an instrument of enforcement, the courts have morphed from constraints on government to mechanisms by which the scope of government has enormously expanded.”
    Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy

  • #22
    Francis Fukuyama
    “Unfortunately, the trading of political influence for money has come back in a big way in American politics, this time in a form that is perfectly legal and much harder to eradicate. Criminalized bribery is narrowly defined in American law as a transaction in which a politician and a private party explicitly agree upon a specific quid pro quo exchange. What is not covered by the law is what biologists call reciprocal altruism, or what an anthropologist might label a gift exchange. In a relationship of reciprocal altruism, one person confers a benefit on another with no explicit expectation that it will immediately buy a return favor, unlike an impersonal market transaction.”
    Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy

  • #23
    Francis Fukuyama
    “Economists agree that all taxes potentially detract from the ability of markets to allocate resources efficiently, and the least inefficient types of taxation are those that are simple, uniform, and predictable, which allow businesses to plan and invest around them. The U.S. tax code is exactly the opposite. While nominal corporate tax rates in the United States are much higher than in other developed countries, very few American corporations actually pay taxes at that rate, because they have negotiated special exemptions and benefits for themselves.”
    Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy

  • #24
    Francis Fukuyama
    “Unrepresentative interest groups are not simply creatures of corporate America and the Right. Some of the most powerful organizations in democratic countries have been trade unions, followed by environmental groups, women’s organizations, advocates of gay rights, the aged, the disabled, indigenous peoples, and virtually every other sector of society.”
    Francis Fukuyama, Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy

  • #25
    Whittaker Chambers
    “For I had begun to understand that to be a witness, in the sense in which I am using the term, means, ultimately, just one thing. It means that a man is prepared to destroy himself, if necessary, to make his witness. A man does not wish to destroy himself. To the full degree in which he is strongest, that is to say, to the full degree of the force that makes it possible for him to bear witness at all, he desires not to destroy himself. To the degree that he is most human, that is to say, most weak, he shrinks from destroying himself. But to the degree that what he truly is and what he stands for are one, he must at some point tacitly consent in his own mind to destroy himself if that is necessary. And, in part, that tacit consent is a simple necessity of the struggle. It is the witnessâ€� margin of maneuver. In no other way can he strip his soul of that dragging humanity, that impeding love of life and its endearments which must otherwise entangle him at every step and distract him at last to failure. This is the point at which the witness is always most alone.”
    Whittaker Chambers, Witness

  • #26
    “the continuous and systematic onslaught against political machines and insiders by progressivism, populism, and libertarianism—three very different political reform movements which nonetheless all regard transactional politics as at best a necessary evil and more often as corrupt and illegitimate. This attack, though well intentioned, has badly damaged the country’s governability, a predictable result (and one accurately predicted more than fifty years ago).”
    Jonathan Rauch, Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money, and Back-Room Deals Can Strengthen American Democracy

  • #27
    “The politicos of our grandparentsâ€� generation did a pretty good job of governing the country, despite living in a world of bosses and back rooms and unlimited donations, and many of them understood some home truths which today’s political reformers have too often overlooked or suppressed. In particular, they understood that transactional politics—the everyday give-and-take of dickering and compromise—is the essential work of governing and that government, and thus democracy, won’t work if leaders can’t make deals and make them stick.”
    Jonathan Rauch, Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money, and Back-Room Deals Can Strengthen American Democracy

  • #28
    “The amateur asserts that principles, rather than interest, ought to be both the end and the motive of political action,â€� Wilson writes. Far from taking a detached attitude, the amateur “sees each battle as a ‘crisis,â€� and each victory as a triumph and each loss as a defeat for a cause.â€�10 The choice of candidates and leaders, for the amateur, should be based on their commitment to principles and policies rather than on personal loyalty or party label or parochial advantage. Parties, rather than being “neutral agentsâ€� to mobilize majorities and gain power, should be “the sources of program and the agents of social change.”
    Jonathan Rauch, Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money, and Back-Room Deals Can Strengthen American Democracy

  • #29
    “Because legitimacy comes from fighting for what’s right, politicians who compromise for the sake of interest or power have sold their souls and lost their legitimacy. For amateurs, justice means not a transactional outcome but fidelity to an abstract ideal, like the public interest. They are suspicious of compromise, loyalty, insiders, inducements, deals. Being amateurs, they typically have jobs outside of politics or enter the political fray only temporarily, a fact which they will trumpet as a source of disinterest and political chastity. (In New York, Wilson notes, anti-Tammany reformers in the 1950s were heavily drawn from Protestant and Jewish middle-class young professionals.) Not being repeat players, they can afford to play single hands for high stakes, and they cannot easily be held accountable for losing.”
    Jonathan Rauch, Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money, and Back-Room Deals Can Strengthen American Democracy

  • #30
    “What, then, is political realism? Attitudinally, it shares many traits and premises with foreign policy realism. It sees governing as difficult and political peace and stability as treasures never to be taken for granted. It understands that power’s complex hydraulics make interventions unpredictable and risky. (Banning some ugly political practice, for instance, won’t necessarily make it go away.) It therefore values incrementalism and, especially, equilibrium—and, therefore, transactional politics. If most of the players in a political system are invested in dickering, the system is doing something right, not something wrong. Back-scratching and logrolling are signs of a healthy political system, not a corrupt one. Transactional politics is not always appropriate or effective, but a political system which is not reliably capable of it is a system in a state of critical failure.”
    Jonathan Rauch, Political Realism: How Hacks, Machines, Big Money, and Back-Room Deals Can Strengthen American Democracy



Rss
« previous 1 3 4 5 6
All Quotes



Tags From Joshua Rosenblum’s Quotes