Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle. Aristocracy ruins itself by limiting too narrowly the circle within which power is confined; oligarchy ruins itself by the incautious scramble for immediate wealth. In either case the end result is revolution. When revolution comes it may seem to arise from little causes and petty whims; but though it may spring from slight occasions it is the precipitate result of grave and accumulated wrongs; when a body is weakened by neglected ills, the merest exposure may bring serious disease…

But even democracy ruins itself by excess -– of democracy. Its basic principle is the equal right of all to hold office and determine public policy. This is at first glance a delightful arrangement: it becomes disastrous because the people are not properly equipped by education to select the best rulers and wisest courses. “As to the people they have no understanding, and only repeat what their rulers are pleased to tell them” (Protagoras, 317); to get a doctrine accepted or rejected it is necessary only to have it praised or ridiculed in a popular play…

Plato complains that whereas in simpler matters –- like shoe-making -– we think that only a specially-trained person will serve our purpose, in politics we presume that every one who knows how to get votes knows how to administer a city or a state… To devise a method of barring incompetence and knavery from public office, and of selecting and preparing the best to rule for the common good -– that is the problem of political philosophy.

If there is a country that has committed unspeakable atrocities in the world, it is the United States of America. They don’t care for human beings.

[A] human economy cannot prescribe the terms of its own success. In a time when we wish to believe that humans are the sole authors of truth, that truth is relative, and that all value judgments are subjective, it is hard to say that a human economy can be wrong, and yet we have good, sound, practical reasons for saying so. It is indeed possible for a human economy to be wrong—not relatively wrong, in the sense of being “out of adjustment,” or unfair according to some definition of fairness—but wrong absolutely and according to practical measures. Of course, if we see the human economy as the only economy, we will see its errors as political failures, and we will continue to talk about “recovery.” It is only when we think of the little human economy in relation to the Great Economy that we begin to understand our errors for what they are and to see the qualitative meanings of our quantitative measures. If we see the industrial economy in terms of the Great Economy, then we begin to see industrial wastes and losses, not as “trade-offs” or “necessary risks” but as costs that, like all costs, are chargeable to somebody, sometime.

It is not an inaccurate or extreme statement to declare that ideological Republicans do not understand what it means to be human. They view human beings as economic units to be plugged at their lowest possible price into a maximally efficient market that provides the greatest possible returns on investment to the wealthy few, with any resulting human resentment and misery dulled by humility before a pleasure-fearing angry God promising rewards to the obedient in the hereafter. It is a dark, meager, shriveled and cramped vision of humanity.
 
To accept their worldview is to reject the essence of human identity and purpose. If human beings could create a sustainable world of plenty free from violence, war, hunger or want, a world in which human beings were free to devote 24 hours a day to the leisurely pursuit of whatever activities they wished so long as they harmed no one else, conservatives would be terrified.
It’s not so much that conservatives don’t believe such a world of boundless human potential is possible. It’s that they don’t want it to be possible.