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famous statement of that finding came from the feminist writer Jo Freeman, who in her 1972 essay “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” observed that when groups operate on vague or anarchic terms, structurelessness “becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others.”
Anand Giridharadas • Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
national movement to apply an ethical framework, through government action, to the untrammeled growth of modern America. Roosevelt understood from the outset that this task hinged upon the need to develop powerfully reciprocal relationships with members of the national press.
Doris Kearns Goodwin • The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism
David Emery • LBJ: 'If You Can Convince the Lowest White Man He's Better Than the Best Colored Man ...'
An ideology is usually a high-minded mask for a group’s itch to take power and resources from other social groups.
Howard Bloom • The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History
on a five-year plan if he’d asked them for one.93 Instead he improvised, edging forward where possible, falling back when necessary, always appearing to do something, never giving in to despair, and in everything remembering what Wilson forgot—that nothing would succeed without widespread continuing public support. “It is a terrible thing,” Rooseve
... See moreJohn Lewis Gaddis • On Grand Strategy
Their purpose was to get public projects built, he would tell them, and to get them built they had to know how to persuade people of their worth—and the key to persuading people was to keep their arguments simple.
Robert A. Caro • The Power Broker
To strategize, coordinate, and sustain a concerted effort to remove someone from power, to secretly move against an enemy, to do what Machiavelli would say was one of the hardest things to do in the world: to overthrow an existing
Ryan Holiday • Conspiracy: A True Story of Power, Sex, and a Billionaire's Secret Plot to Destroy a Media Empire
Ortega held the process to be the driving force of history. The “reciprocal action between the masses and select minorities,” he wrote, “is the fundamental fact of every society and the agent of its evolution for good or evil.” Ortega’s masses we now call the public. By “select minorities” he meant the admirable few: elites who, at their best, lavi
... See moreMartin Gurri • Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium
As for the vilification that he spewed over his opponent and everyone connected with him—former friends as well as enemies—it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the explanation for this, too, lay in character rather than campaign tactics. Since his earliest days in power, Moses had tried not just to defeat but to destroy anyone who stood in
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