The Democratic Party,” wrote the late Walter Laqueur, was “liberal and slightly left-of-centre in outlook, progressive but not too much so, in favour of reform but afraid of going too far. . . . They had quite a few professors among their leading supporters and also some bankers and industrialists, but for the majority of academics . . . [it] was quite unacceptable.” Bourgeois parties “are never militant, almost by definition”—and the “Democratic Party was perhaps the least militant of all.”
Central to its impotence, Laqueur believed, was “the mood of an activist younger generation.” An “unthinking, aimless radicalism,” which “preferred drums to speeches and parades to long and inconclusive discussions,” could “turn left or right or lead nowhere at all.” Not just on college campuses: “Contempt for ‘the system,’” its “vested interests, cliques, and party caucuses,” permeated the middle class. Leftists “attacked the Republic and all it stood for as something that was rotten through and through,” while conservatives thought “‘the system’ so corrupt that any political order that succeeded it would be an improvement”—even as they complained (correctly) that “the left was anti-patriotic.” Both sides “were unhappy, though for different reasons, with . . . the existing state of affairs.” “There was not the slightest willingness to take each other’s point of view seriously, let alone to compromise.”
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