RE: The Wisdom or Folly of Efforts to Broaden & Deepen Citizens' Involvement in Politics.

"It is not altogether a bad thing in a republic that people feel remote from public affairs; a widespread preoccupation with politics is a sign of tumult and trouble. Self-government involves a process of self-selection. Politics becomes the responsibility of people who take the trouble to understand it.... This process of self-selection is not something we should tamper with. With considerable efficiency it weeds out the lazy, the petulant, the disorderly, the ignorant...."

      Andrew Ferguson, "Vanishing Voters, Vamoose!", THE WEEKLY
            STANDARD (April 10, 2000).

"Earlier generations of Americans realized that a sound country depended on a sound electorate. They regarded voting as a privilege, not a right. Laws were enacted in the various states, setting forth education and/or property requirements for voting. It was assumed then that those who couldn't understand the Constitution and who didn't have a property stake in the community weren't fit to elect representatives to government bodies. That sound policy has been bulldozed aside in recent years. Every warm body is eligible to cast a vote on issues affecting the liberty and property of the people. This disregard for standards results from a sentimental notion about equality.

"...semi-literate voters can be removed from the voter rolls. ...it is very important that those citizens best qualified to make the policies of the nation determine in their minds that standards be set anew for the electorate."

      Anthony Harrigan, AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES (Southern States
            Industrial Council, 1972).

"...in American politics the standard of intelligence and academic excellence is not very high. Deeply reflective people are not common in American politics, and they are often not successful. If you were to look at the IQs or standardized-test scores of most successful politicians, you'd think they were layabout high school dropouts or shade-tree mechanics."

      Ross Baker (Rutgers University Professor of Political
            Science), Quoted by Roger Simon in "Who's the
            Dimmest Dim Bulb?  U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT
            (April 3, 2000).

"Democracy [of the constitutional type], though slowly attained and never by revolutionary jumps, is the best government on earth when it tries to make all its citizens aristocrats. But not when it guillotines whoever is individual, superior, or just different."

      Peter Viereck, CONSERVATISM REVISITED (The Free Press,
            1962).

"The extraordinary conservatism of America's founding fathers is today often ignored. Liberals discuss it with pained embarrassment as a family skeleton. Yet it may account for ours being one of the oldest surviving democracies, one of the few never overthrown. A leftist or rightist dictatorship can more easily overthrow an unconservative democracy, where change is too rapid or where an unchecked majoritarianism can sweep a dictator to power during a transient mob hysteria, regretted too late."

      Peter Viereck, CONSERVATISM REVISITED (The Free Press,
            1962).

"Political leaders, not oblivious of votes, rightly praise the benefits of majority rule. They discuss too little the dangers of majority dictatorship. These dangers had been discussed and guarded against by the framers of the American Constitution. Whether the rulers be the aristocracy or demos, it is essential to limit their rule by a constitution and by just laws. As Plato argued and as history has illustrated, the despotism of demos passes readily into that of the tyrant [autocrat], both alike in being arbitrary, unchecked by the rights of minorities and individuals. Individual freedom is attacked from the right by compulsory inequality, enforced by cast lines, and from the left by compulsory equality, enforced by guillotines. Yet freedom should be the goal of all political action, ahead of comfort, circuses, and gregarious comrade-ism. Freedom is more important to creativity and thereby, in the longrun, to the human race than a leveling majoritarianism, that bed of Procrustes worshipped by the breathless heralds of progress."

      Peter Viereck, CONSERVATISM REVISITED (The Free Press,
            1962).

"Society is a living organism with roots in the past. The true community, the Conservative likes to say, is a tree, not a machine. It rose to its present strength and glory through centuries of growth, and men must forbear to think of it as a mechanical contrivance that can be dismantled and reassembled in one generation. Not fiat but prescription, not the open hand of experiment but the hidden hand of custom, is the chief creative force in the social process.

"Society is cellular. It is not an agglomeration of lonely individuals, but a grand union of functional groups. Man is a social animal whose best interests are served by cooperating with other men. Indeed, he has no real meaning except as a contributing member of his family, church, local community, and, at certain stages of historical development, occupational association. The group is important not only because it gives life, work, comfort, and spiritual support to the individual, but also because it joins with thousands of other groups to form the one really stubborn roadblock against the march of the all-powerful state.

"In addition to intrinsic groups like the family and church, a healthy society will display a balanced combination of institutions: constitution, common law, [constitutional] monarchy or presidency, legislature, courts, civil service, armed services ... [political] subdivisions, colleges, schools, forms of property, corporations, trade unions, guilds, fraternal orders, and dozens of other instrumentalities and understandings that mold the lives of men. Such symbols of tradition, of national unity and community, as anthems, flags, rituals, battlefields, monuments, and pantheons of heroes are are equally dear to the Conservative heart."

      Clinton Rossiter, Conservatism in America (Cambridge: Harvard 
            University Press, 1982), pp. 27-28.

"Society is structured. The Conservative ... recognizes the existence of classes and orders as a positive good. By no means wedded to the habit of making rigid distinctions, he sees the social structure not as a series of neat strata laid one on top of another, but, in Coleridge's phrase, as 'an indisoluble blending and interfusion of persons from top to bottom.' There must, in any case, be a top, visible and reasonably durable; and ... the self-conscious Conservative is usually to be found in or around it."

      Clinton Rossiter, Conservatism in America (Cambridge: Harvard 
            University Press, 1982), p. 28.

"Society is a unity. In the healthy community, all the groups and institutions and classes fit together into a harmonious whole, and attempts to reshape one part of society must inevitably disturb other parts. The Conservative, though something of a pluralist, never loses sight of the ultimate unity into which all the parts of society must finally merge."

      Clinton Rossiter Rossiter, Conservatism in America (Cambridge: Harvard 
            University Press, 1982), p. 28.

"Society cannot be static. Change is the rule of life, for societies as for men. A community cannot stand still; it must develop or decay. And the Conservative must not be afraid to abandon patently outworn institutions and ideals.

"Russell Kirk acknowledges: 'Society must alter, for slow change is the means of its conservation, like the human body's perpetual renewal.' In recognizing ... this great social truth, the Conservative shows he is ... emphatically not a Liberal or radical, and he therefore sets severe conditions upon social change, especially if it is to be worked by active reform. Change, he insists, must never be taken for its own sake; must have have preservation, if possible even restoration, as its central object; must be severely limited in scope and purpose; must be a response to an undoubted social need -- for example, the renovation or elimination of an institution that is plainly obsolete; must be worked out by slow and careful stages; must be brought off under Conservative auspices, or with Conservatives intervening at the decisive moment...; and finally, in Benjamin Disraeli's words, must 'be carried out in deference to the manners, the customs, the laws, the traditions of the people.' The essence of Conservatism is the feeling for the possibilities and limits of natural, organic change, and the kindred feeling that, while change is constant and inevitable, progress is neither constant nor inevitable."

      Clinton Rossiter, Conservatism in America (Cambridge: Harvard 
            University Press, 1982), pp. 28-29.

"The true Conservative knows that the economic problem blends into the political problem, and the political problem into the ethical problem, and the ethical problem into the religious problem. There exists a hierarchy of difficulties, as well as a hierarchy of values. ...questions of morals and faith ... underlie the Conservative view of society."

      Russell Kirk, Prospects for Conservatives (Chicago: Henry 
            Regnery, 1956), p. 5.

"What gives the true Conservative his strength in our time of troubles is his belief in a moral order which joins all classes in a common purpose, and through which man may live in justice and liberty."

      Russell Kirk, Prospects for Conservatives (Chicago: Henry 
            Regnery, 1956), p. 36.

"The Conservative understands that the circumstances of men are almost infinitely variable, and that any particular political or economic policy must be decided in the light of the particular circumstances of time and place -- an enlightened expediency, or prudence."

      Russell Kirk, Prospects for Conservatives (Chicago: Henry 
            Regnery, 1956), p. 5.

"The Conservative instinct of America ... must draw its vigor from everyone who believes in enduring truth, in liberty under law, and in the political and economic institutions essential to the preservation of a just and free and tranquil society. Americans have more to conserve, probably, than have any other modern people; and Conservative impulses are more general among us than anywhere else.

"We all are partners in this gigantic incorporation of American society, whether our material share in the national partnership is large or small; the man with the smallest portion has as much right to that share as the man with the greatest possessions has to what is his own. Correspondingly, we all have the duty of standing by our common heritage of the [American] Republic."

      Russell Kirk, Prospects for Conservatives (Chicago; Henry 
            Regnery, 1956), p. 36.