“The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to the doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can “throw the rascals out” at any election without leading to any profound or extreme shifts in policy. “{p. 1247-1248}

Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, 1966

And this note for conspiracy aficionados from an admirer:

“Many people interested in Carroll Quigley take entirely out of context the references he made in his book Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time about a high-level Anglophile conspiracy that, he said, flourished before World War II. It seems that many people believe Quigley thought this vast conspiracy somehow continues to operate right up to our own day.

But as Dr. Quigley once told me, the reality is much scarier. Instead of a secret cabal now being in charge, there’s no one in charge….”

Comment:

That, of course, is a clever disclaimer. Perhaps there is a group in control…perhaps not. But surely there is a system of thought in control. Corporatism (industrial capitalism as we know it) and socialism, apparently at odds but actually knitted together, with control in the hands of small groups of elites in finance and their apologists in the media and in academia….

That’s quite a plausible conspiracy. American history does indeed show an alliance between big business and so-called progressive reform ….certainly from the era of the Progressives onward. The ideology that has driven this is Fabian socialism, out of which developed theories of mass control, useful both for the work place and equally in politics.

Doug Boggs adds to this discussion with a very interesting post on how complex groups function, where he looks at some of the break-down today in terms of evolutionary change (if I understand him right).