“Political commentator E. J. Dionne has written that Americans are fed up with politics and many among us just want politics to go away. A distaste for conflict is a distaste for politics. The great Frederick Douglass once remarked that you cannot have rain without occasional thunder and lightning. Yet that is what so many of us seem to want……Need I note that life doesn’t work like that and that no complex democratic politics can survive if we go underground with what we care about most deeply.”
– Jean Bethke Elshtain