Elmer Eric Schattschneider Quotes

The attack on politics, politicians and political parties and the praise of nonpartisanship are significant in terms of the control of the scale of conflict. One-party systems, as an aspect of sharply sectional party alignments, have been notoriously useful instruments for the limitation of conflict and depression of political participation. This tends to be equally true of measures designed to set up nonpartisan government or measures designed to take important public business out of politics altogether.

The scope and bias of the pressure system do not fit easily into the calculus of party politics. First, the pressure system is much too small to play the role sometimes assigned to it. Secondly, the supposed party neutrality of the pressure groups is largely a myth.

There is a perpetual effort of the parties to isolate each other. To say it crudely, all radical proposals for the re-organization of American politics propose to isolate the rich.

The vice of the groupist theory is that it conceals the most significant aspects of the system. The flaw in the pluralist heaven is that the heavenly chorus sings with a strong upperclass accent. Probably about 90 per cent of the people cannot get into the pressure system.

From the standpoint of party politics the margins within which pressure groups operate are limited. If a group divides equally in an election, its impact is zero.

What is government? From the outside it looks like a security system based on the marriage of land and people, From the inside, it looks like and attempts to create a community. A government is like an oyster, hard on the outside and soft on the inside, and the outside and inside are utterly dependent on each other.

Democracy has no place for the kind of justice implied in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Democracy is a system for the resolution of conflict, not for vengeance. Simple black-white notions of right and wrong do not fit into democratic politics. Political controversies result from the fact that the issues are complex, and men may properly have differences of opinion about them. The most terrible of all over-simplifications is the notion that politics is a contest between good people and bad people. Democracy is based on a profound insight into human nature, the realization that all men are sinful, all are imperfect, all are prejudiced, and none knows the whole truth. That is why we need liberty and why we have an obligation to hear all men. Liberty gives us a chance to learn from other people, to become aware of our own limitations, and to correct our bias. Even when we disagree with other people we like to think that they speak from good motives, and while we realize that all men are limited, we do not let ourselves imagine that any man is bad. Democracy is a political system for people who are not sure that they are right.

Political conflict is not like an intercollegiate debate in which the opponents agree in advance on a definition of the issues. As a matter of fact, the definition of the alternatives is the supreme instrument of power; the antagonists can rarely agree on what the issues are because power is involved in the definition.

The distinction between public and special interests is an indispensable tool for the study of politics. To abolish the distinction is to make a shambles of political science by treating things that are different as if they were alike.

In the nature of things a political conflict among special interests is never restricted to the groups most immediately interested.

I suppose the most important thing I have done in my field is that I have talked longer and harder and more persistently and enthusiastically about political parties than anyone else alive.

The role of conflict in the political system depends, first, on the morale, self-confidence and security of the individuals and groups who must challenge the dominant groups in the community in order to raise an opposition.

Government is the most successful idea in the world, but for all its success and importance it is something imperfect. There is no ideal state. After thousands of years it is still a mixture of good and evil.

Since it is not easy to move special-interest groups from one party camp into the other, is it not better party strategy to try to capitalize on the public hostility toward many of these groups than it is to woo them?

The power of pressure groups tends to evaporate when it is translated into other dimensions of politics because the calculus of party politics is entirely different from the calculus of pressure politics. Numbers are everything in one dimension and very little in the other. We are dealing with two different strategies of politics and two different concepts of political organization. Moreover, the end product of party politics is inevitably different from that of pressure politics. Inevitably some people prefer one game to the other.