Insightful remarks on the nature of American politics and governance

“We’re not a democracy. It’s a terrible misunderstanding and a slander to the idea of democracy to call us that. In reality, we’re a plutocracy: a government by the wealthy.”

–Ramsey Clark

“Of all forms of tyranny the least attractive and the most vulgar is the tyranny of mere wealth, the tyranny of plutocracy.”

–John Pierpont Morgan

“I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”

–Thomas Jefferson

“I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavour [endeavor] to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.”

–Abraham Lincoln

“The real truth of the matter is, as you and I know, that a financial element in the large centers has owned the government of the U.S. since the days of Andrew Jackson.”

–Franklin D. Roosevelt

“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of State and corporate power.”

–Benito Mussolini

The compilation of quotations was derived from an email correspondence authored by Dennis Morrisseau: A Vermont politician, he was the first Republican to run for Congress on a platform that included the impeachment of both Bush and Chaney. His biography also includes an incident during the Vietnam War where he, when serving as an officer in the Military, as a protest to the war, refused to engage in combat, and was subsequently court marshaled.

I have included this brief biographic description because it evidences the differences existing among the various types of political conservatism and demonstrates that the two-dimensional framework used by the punditry to index political ideologies is woefully inadequate and, indeed, in some cases misrepresentative. There are undoubtedly a whole field of ideological commonalities to be discovered between and among all of us, irrespective of the Left/Right division we have been lulled into assuming to impose barriers between us.

Russell Cole

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