If it be a fatal error entirely to rely on the justice and equity of those who govern, it is an error no less fatal to imagine, that while virtue and moderation are the constant companions of those who oppose the abuses of Power, all ambition, all love of dominion are confined to the other party.

DE LOLME, J.L., The Constitution of England, Book IX, Chapter V, 1771

[T]he process of political contention necessarily weeds out most competitors before the final vote. How this weeding takes place is at least as important as the deciding vote...Issue and candidate selection initially takes place among self-selected activists who are much better informed about at least some issues than are average citizens. At this stage increasing knowledge about issues generally makes a person increasingly influential...Activists influence both general public and political decision makers. For the issues on which they focus they are disproportionately influential...It is probably the case that the activists’ influence strongly accounts for why political parties actually have fairly good records in attempting to keep their platform pledges...It is the division of knowledge among activists and the general public, and the organizing costs faced by would-be political innovators seeking to reach other activists, that are crucial in understanding how a democracy works...I am saying that those who desire to know more about a particular issue can easily discover more, whereas those who are not particularly interested in politics but who still vote do not need to know very much at all in order to vote their own interests, given the necessarily limited choices that appear before them on the ballot. The continuing influence of the Athenian ideal of citizens sagaciously deciding each issue on its merits continually gets in the way of understanding what liberal democracies really are: an example of a modern complex society ordered by genuinely democratic self-organizing processes rather than a second-best alternative to the ideal of face-to-face democracy.

DIZERGA, GUS, Persuasion, Power and Polity, A Theory of Democratic Self-Organization, Chapter Five

[P]olitics seems so very often to have been corrupted by the temptations to wield coercive power for private ends.

DIZERGA, GUS, Persuasion, Power and Polity, A Theory of Democratic Self-Organization, Chapter Eight

When the government's boot is on your throat, whether it is a left boot or a right boot is of no consequence.

Thus the party system at once became in effect an elaborate system of fetiches, which, in order to be made as impressive as possible, were chiefly moulded up around the constitution, and were put on show as "constitutional principles." The history of the whole post-constitutional period, from 1789 to the present day, is an instructive and cynical exhibit of the fate of these fetiches when they encounter the one only actual principle of party action - the principle of keeping open the channels of access to the political means. When the fetich of "strict construction," for example, has collided with this principle, it has invariably gone by the board, the party that maintained it simply changing sides.

In his second term Mr. Jefferson discovered the tendency towards bipartisanship, and was both dismayed and puzzled by it. I have elsewhere remarked his curious inability to understand how the cohesive power of public plunder works straight towards political bipartisanship. In 1823, finding some who called themselves Republicans favouring the Federalist policy of centralization, he spoke of them in a rather bewildered way as "pseudo-Republicans, but real Federalists." But most naturally any Republican who saw a chance of profiting by the political means would retain the name, and at the same time resist any tendency within the party to impair the general system which held out such a prospect. In this way bipartisanship arises. Party designations become purely nominal, and the stated issues between parties become progressively trivial; and both are more and more openly kept up with no other object than to cover from scrutiny the essential identity of purpose in both parties.

The dirty secret of both political parties...is that they have adopted not "right" and "left" positions but positions that are anti-freedom. The Democrats are radicalized socialists while the Republicans are increasingly radicalized militarists and nationalists. A vote for either is a vote for fewer freedoms, more taxes, more big government spending and Federal Reserve machinations.