Vital Center, The Book

From Chapter 2, The Failure of the Right:

"The capitalists have not been, in the political sense, an effective governing class. They have constituted typically a plutocracy, not an aristocracy."

"Men accustomed to the exclusive pursuit of their own interests find it hard to assume the role of the politician, who must balance and reconcile the conflicting interests of many groups. The plutocracy thinks in terms of class and not nation, in terms of private profit and not of social obligation, in terms of business dealings and not of war, in terms of security and not honor. With its power founded on finance and thus dependent on the preservation of the delicate skeins of promissory confidence, the plutocracy above all dreads violence and change, whether internal or external."

"In quiet times power gravitates to business as the strongest economic group in society; but it has never been able to use that power long for national purposes. Dominated by personal and class considerations, business rule tends to bring public affairs to a state of crisis and to drive the rest of the community into despair bordering on revolution."

"The dynamism of capitalism is trickling out in a world where the passion for security breeds merger and monopoly...in the end there will be no one ready to go down swinging for institutions so abstract, impersonal and remote...Capitalism, in brief, at once strengthens the economic centralization and loosens the moral bonds of society."

From Chapter 3, The Failure of the Left:

"As the child of eighteenth-century rationalism and nineteenth-century romanticism, progressivism was committed to an unwarranted optimism about man."

"For its persistent and sentimental optimism has endowed...progressivism with what in the middle twentieth-century are fatal weaknesses: a weakness for impotence, because progressivism believes that history will make up for human error; a weakness for rhetoric, because it believes that man can be reformed by argument; a weakness for economic fetishism, because it believes that the good in man will be liberated by a change in economic institutions; a weakness for political myth, because...optimism requires somewhere an act of faith in order to survive the contradictions of history."

From Chapter 4, The Challenge of Totalitarianism:

"Man longs to escape the pressures beating down on his frail individuality; and, more and more, the sureset means of escape seems to be to surrender that individuality to some massive, external authority...The totalitarian state, which has risen in specific response to this fear of freedom, is an invention of the twentieth century...Totalitarianism...pulverizes the social structure, grinding all independent groups and diverse loyalties into a single amorphous mass. The sway of the totalitarian state is unlimited. This very fact is a source of its profound psychological appeal."

"Against the western sense of being out of joint with history, the totalitarians proclaim their oneness with history...The honest defender of the free individual can only confess the uninspiring belief that most basic problems are insoluble. The totalitarian promises a new heaven and a new earth."

"Against the background of demoralization and exhaustion, the sheer dynamism of the totalitarian promise acquires a glistening certainty which few men can stand up against...people in general...tend to confound immediate power with the ultimate verdicts of history."

"Fascism and Communism thus rise from a genuinely revolutionary dissatisfaction with existing society; but the revolutionary impulses are doomed to frustration and die under the heels of the new ruling class they have installed in power."

From Chapter 8, The Revival of American Radicalism:

"Our democratic tradition has been at its best an activist tradition. It has found its fulfillment, not in complaint or in escapism, but in responsibility and decision."

"For the doer, the essential form of democratic education is the taking of great decisions under the burden of civic responsibility. For the wailer, liberalism is the mass expiatory ritual by which the individual relieves himself of responsibility for the government's behavior."

"A liberalism which purports to shape a real world must first accept the limitations and possibilities of that world. It must reconcile itself to a tedious study of detail…"

"Even the most guileless of our democratic leaders have had in their heart a searching doubt about human perfectibility -- a conviction that every form of human power requires relentless correction. This, indeed, is the gusto of democracy, the underlying sense of comedy which brooks no worship of authority because it knows no man is that good."

"It is a moderate pessimism about man which truly fortifies society against authoritarianism -- because pessimism must apply far more strongly to a special elite or a single party, exposed to the temptation of pride and power, than it does to the people in general."

"The people as a whole are not perfect; but no special group of the people is more perfect: that is the moral and rationale for democracy. Consistent pessimism about man, far from promoting authoritarianism, alone can inoculate democratic faith against it."

"The problem of classes is this: Class conflict is essential if freedom is to be preserved, because it is the only barrier against class domination; yet class conflict, pursued to excess, may well destroy the underlying fabric of common principle which sustains free society."

"Big government, for all its dangers, remains democracy's only effective response to big business -- especially when big business behaves with such political recklessness as it has in the United States."

From Chapter 11, Freedom: A Fighting Faith:

"Free society alienates the lonely and uprooted masses; while totalitarianism, building on their frustrations and cravings, provides a structure of belief, men to worship and men to hate and rites which guarantee salvation."

"Our democracy has still to generate a living emotional content, rich enough to overcome the anxieties incited by industrialism, deep enough to rally its members to battle for freedom…"

"Democracy...has assumed, much too confidently, that the gnawing problems of doubt and anxiety would be banished by the advance of science or cured by a rise in the standard of living...Democracy has no defense...against the neuroses of industrialism. When philosophies of blood and violence arise to take up the slack between democracy's thin optimism and the bitter agonies of experience, democracy by comparison appears pale and bitter."

"And the casualties multiply: the possessors are corrupted by power, the middling undone by boredom, the dispossessed demoralized by fear. Chamber-of-commerce banalities will no longer console industrial man."

"The inadequacy of our institutions only intensifies the tribute society levies from man: it but exacerbates the moral crisis. The rise of totalitarianism, in other words, signifies more than an internal crisis for democratic society. It signifies an internal crisis for democratic man. There is a Hitler, a Stalin in every breast."

"The hope for free society lies, in the last resort, in the kind of men it creates."

"Democracy requires unremitting action on many fronts. It is, in other words, a process, not a conclusion."

"For conflict is also the guarantee of freedom; it is the instrument of change; it is, above all, the source of discovery, the source of art, the source of love...The choice is between conflict and stagnation...The totalitarians regard the toleration of conflict as our central weakness."