Politics in America is the binding secular religion.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that politics in America functions as a unifying belief system for its citizens.
Theodore White's quote highlights the central role that politics plays in American society, suggesting that it is not merely a system of governance but rather a secular religion that shapes the values, beliefs, and identity of the nation. Similar to how religion can unify people with shared beliefs and rituals, politics in America offers a framework for understanding collective interests, fostering a sense of belonging, and creating a narrative for the American experience.
In practice
In a discussion about civic engagement, one might mention, 'As Theodore White said, politics in America is like a binding secular religion.'
Generally students are the best vehicles for passing on ideas, for their thoughts are plastic and can be molded and they can adjust the ideas of old men to the shape of reality as they find it in villages and hills of China or in ghettos and suburbs of America.
Power in America today is control of the means of communication.
I happen to think that American politics is one of the noblest arts of mankind; and I cannot do anything else but write about it.
History is always best written generations after the event, when clouded fact and memory have all fused into what can be accepted as truth, whether it be so or not.
To go against the dominant thinking of your friends, of most of the people you see every day, is perhaps the most difficult act of heroism you can perform.
There is no excitement anywhere in the world, short of war, to match the excitement of the American presidential campaign.
If the Tenth Amendment were still taken seriously, most of the federal government's present activities would not exist. That's why no one in Washington ever mentions it.
Looking back on 200 years of feminist agitation in this country, we've got to get it that the moral high ground doesn't get us anything. Pleading with powerful men never gets us what we need. Talking doesn't do it. Being right doesn't do it. Hardball politics does it ... and a political strategy.
The problem with party politics is that people get involved every two or four years and that is it. In the meantime, the legislature and Minnesota politics are on a separate track.
We vainly fancy ourselves above the ugly informing and paranoia of the right-wing McCarthy era, but in the 21st century, the Left has fashioned a mirror image.
The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is that in a democracy you vote first and take orders later; in a dictatorship you don't have to waste your time voting.
There is no week, nor day, nor hour, when tyranny may not enter upon this country, if the people lose their supreme confidence in themselves, and lose their roughness and spirit of defiance. Tyranny may always enter—there is no charm or bar against it.
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