Democratic Quotes - page 48
Virtually everywhere in the world, people still wake up and want their country to be more like the United States than any other nation. We are the envy of the world because of what we stand for and how our democratic process, flawed as it may often seem to be, operates. We should take pride in that.
Eliot Spitzer
We have gained very much from foreign sources and even from foreign immigration. The modern conception of keeping out all alien immigrants may be an economic necessity, but I am satisfied it is a psychological evil. The democratic principle is just as important in international as in national affairs.
Robert Cecil, 1st Viscount Cecil of Chelwood
This is why it is vital that Blue Labour's vision of a democratic self-governing nation that honours and rewards work, restores institutional integrity to the places that people live and supports family life based upon love and mutual sacrifice becomes Labour's vision. It is also vital that Blue Labour reasserts its internationalism and makes free and democratic trade unions, all over the world, From Beijing to Tehran, from Havana to Halifax a central role of Foreign Policy.
Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman
Post-war Labour ideology in Britain has reached the end of the road. We tried the state (1945), we tried the market (1997), then we tried them both together (2007) and Britain is still not generating value in anything other than financial services and high end university teaching and research. Paradoxically, both sectors are protected by the two most ancient, and most democratic self-governing institutions left in the country. Cambridge University on the one side and the City of London Corporation on the other. It is time for our socialist tradition to rediscover the social.
Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman
I am working with Unite in Salford to set up the Bank of Salford. It is going well. They have consolidated the credit unions, put money in, the city council will put their pay roll through it to stabilise the asset, the government are supporting it with advice and lowering entry requirements to become a bank that can lend to businesses as well as families. It will be bounded within Salford, there will be local residents on the board as well as institutions, but Unite cannot do it on their own. There needs to be a partnership between the Church and labour that can put some constraint on capital without relying on the state. Relational accountability and democratic governance are key to this. That is how the old bones will walk again, by renewing a commitment to the common good in action. It's a great thing to do.
Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman
And what is going on is that the SPD (Social Democratic Party of Germany) has lost the trust of working class German voters, is overwhelmingly a party of the public sector, social science graduates and ethnic minorities and won barely more than a quarter of the vote. It has moved its concerns from those of the internal governance of the political economy to a political and legal orientation that requires the passing of laws, external regulation and redistribution. It has not seriously defended the internal virtues of its economic system, preferring to stress external factors such a stimulus and taxation. Justice and rights rather than democracy and the good have come to define the position. I am strongly suggesting the party has become liberal rather than socialist and that is the fundamental problem.
Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman
Among those who voted Brexit, there is still support for Parliament and its traditional sovereignty, for the monarchy, for the NHS, and for the Union. As the Copeland by-election showed, they prefer to vote Conservative rather than Ukip, and as the Stoke result indicates, many will grudgingly vote Labour rather than Ukip. What they wish to see is a democratic politics that represents their interests. If this is populism then it is of a muted English variety that wishes to see the renewal of national institutions and a recognition that family, place and work-the things that matter to them-matter to their rulers.
Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman
The overriding paradox is that a democratic and vocational resistance to modernity, defined as the joint sovereignty of financial markets and public administration is the most efficient, competitive and sustainable modern position. The tragedy is that such a reasonable political position is unavailable within the mainstream of European politics, indeed there are those who argue that it would be illegal and an infringement of EU rules concerning competition.
Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman
The big thing that happened in the early to mid-90s was the last big discussion about political economy. Roughly speaking we went for endogenous growth, for flexible labour markets and the financial sector, and that was considered modern. The book that I wrote at that time was arguing that the German system – which had worker representation on boards, very strong vocational training, regional banks, very strong federal forms of democratic government – was actually better suited to globalisation because it preserved knowledge, trust, institutions, skills ... Now, I think the results of our experiment are in and we really got it wrong.
Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman
We believe that capitalism, and unfettered capitalism poses a threat to human existence through the commodification of the person and nature. And we believe in defending people and nature through democratic association, and confronting and constraining the domination of capital through building a balance of interests in corporate governance and public sector. We take on, we've taken on the banks in the city of London. That's who we are.
Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman
Old Labour's international solidarity did not require the abandonment of the national democratic inheritance. But today's left-liberals simply do not understand the traditional commitment to earning and belonging. This puts them at odds with how people understand themselves. We are beings with a tendency to attachment; in order to be open to the environment our bodies must also be closed; and in physics, atoms have a tendency to cluster. And yet in politics an ultra-liberal ideal developed that belonging, attachment and sociability, reinforced by institutions, should be replaced by the almost unmediated movement of people through space.
Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman
I would argue for the establishment of unitary city parliaments in all our major cities. The entire population of Scotland could fit into North London and all of Wales into South London with something to spare and yet we fret over our national settlement. Of far more importance is the establishment and linking of institutional power for capital and citizens in a renewed framework of democratic cities and counties. That is one meaning of the Labour Commonwealth.
Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman
We now live in what the German political scientist Ernst Fränkl called the dual state. Totalitarian states are always dual states. ... The outward forms of democracy, of democratic participation, voting, competing political parties, judicial oversight and legislation remain, but are hollow political stagecraft. And Fränkl called those who wield this unchecked power over the citizenry "the prerogative state.” The masses in a totalitarian structure live in what he termed "the normative state.”.
Chris Hedges
Labour was different to other European Social Democratic Parties in that it was never aggressively secular and was not divided by confessional fissures. Its founding act, the Dock Strike of 1889 was brokered by the Salvation Army and Cardinal Manning. It was never a revolutionary party that became more peaceable but was, from the start, committed to extending democracy within the inherited constitution. It also had a base of support among the working class that secured British democracy from Fascism and Communism and that was because of its paradoxical nature, as conservative as it was radical, as patriotic as it was nationalist. The greatest failure of New Labour is that it led rather than resisted the definition of the European Union as a neo-liberal project and did not develop a constructive alternative to the status quo. It seemed incapable of distinguishing between internationalism and globalisation.
Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman
The reason liberals despise Clarence Thomas or caricature a Ben Carson, more so than they do white conservative justices or public figures, is the threat that they pose to the entire engine of liberal condescension - and Democratic politics. When successful blacks prove that they easily compete in the marketplace of talent and ideas without liberal racial policies and their political henchmen, then the entire architecture of liberal racial politics collapses. The disdain shown a Thomas or Carson suggests that liberal racial politics serve as private medieval penance in the abstract, and at little personal cost for assuaging guilt over liberal apartheid.
Victor Davis Hanson
We should pause to appreciate that the American democratic experiment in ethnic and racial diversity is nearly unique. Indeed, the very idea of racial diversity and nationhood does not have much of a record of success in history. Few countries have been able to transcend their ethnic origins and sustain a racially pluralistic society. Rome was an exception and pulled it off for nearly 500 years, as the Roman Empire grew to encompass non-Italian peoples from the Euphrates to Scotland before unwinding into tribal chaos. The Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires worked for long periods, though they relied on the use of autocratic force and imperial coercion to suppress minorities, in ways antithetical to modern notions of governance.
Victor Davis Hanson
