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Updated: June 8, 2025
Some had suffered less, but what characterised nearly all of these bourgeois was the reverence they had for the great slogans of the past: "Committee of Public Safety," "The Country in Danger," "Plutarch," "De Viris," "Horace," it seemed impossible for them to look at the present with eyes of today; perhaps they had no eyes to see with.
For national unity is, in a very real and a very deep sense, the fundamental safeguard of all democracy. Doctrines that set group against group, faith against faith, race against race, class against class, fanning the fires of hatred in men too despondent, too desperate to think for themselves, were used as rabble-rousing slogans on which dictators could ride to power.
They feel, let us say, the temper of the foreman, the nerve-racking monotony of the machine, the depressingly bad air, the drudgery of their wives, the stunting of their children, the dinginess of their tenements. The slogans of the strike are invested with these feelings. But the reporter and reader see at first only a strike and some catchwords. They invest these with their feelings.
But there is an added technique for weakening a nation at its very roots, for disrupting the entire pattern of life of a people. And it is important that we understand it. The method is simple. It is, first, a dissemination of discord. A group not too large a group that may be sectional or racial or political is encouraged to exploit its prejudices through false slogans and emotional appeals.
The Secretary of State realized that in a democracy statesmen cannot overlook the necessity of condensing their policies into popular catchwords or slogans. Today such phrases represent in large measure the power referred to in the old saying: "Let me make the songs of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws."
Whatever their respective slogans and professions of political faith, they were little more than personal followers of rival generals or politicians who yearned to occupy the presidential chair. Upon the downfall of Iturbide, the malcontents in Central America bestirred themselves to throw off the Mexican yoke.
Bonaparte took notice of all these invectives hurled at the legislative power, he learned them by heart, and, on December 21, 1851, he showed the parliamentary royalists that he had learned from them. He repeated their own slogans against themselves. The Barrot ministry and the party of Order went further.
The songs of the young girls, interrupted by the explosion of hotel slogans and college cries from the young men, floated off to him on the thin breeze of the cloudless August morning, like the hymns and shouts of a saturnalian rout going in holiday processional to sacrifice to their gods.
The songs of the young girls, interrupted by the explosion of hotel slogans and college cries from the young men, floated off to him on the thin breeze of the cloudless August morning, like the hymns and shouts of a saturnalian rout going in holiday processional to sacrifice to their gods.
They are to be found in the aspirations of labor, among the awakened women, in the development of business, the diffusion of art and science, in the racial mixtures, and many lesser interests which cluster about these greater movements. The desire for a human politics is all about us. It rises to the surface in slogans like "human rights above property rights," "the man above the dollar."
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