Most of the organizational problems of the parties are unique. The party system is by a wide margin the largest mobilization of people in the country… - Elmer Eric Schattschneider

The substitution of conflicts is the most devastating kind of political strategy. Alliances are formed and re-formed; fortresses, positions, alignments and combinations are destroyed or abandoned in a tremendous shuffle of forces redeployed to defend new positions or to take new strong points. In politics the most catastrophic force in the world is the power of irrelevance which transmutes one conflict into another and turns all existing alignments inside out.

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.

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.