"Every little school boy is trained to recite the weaknesses and inefficiencies of the Articles of Confederation.  It is taken as axiomatic that under them the new nation was falling into anarchy and was only saved by the wisdom and energy of the Convention.  …  The nation had to be strong to repel invasion, strong to pay to the last loved copper penny the debts of the propertied and the provident ones, strong to keep the unpropertied and improvident from ever using the government to secure their own prosperity at the expense of moneyed capital.  …  No one suggests that the anxiety of the leaders of the heretofore unquestioned ruling classes desired the revision of the Articles and labored so weightily over a new instrument not because the nation was failing under the Articles, but because it was succeeding only too well.  Without intervention from the leaders, reconstruction threatened in time to turn the new nation into an agrarian and proletarian democracy.  …  All we know is that at a time when the current of political progress was in the direction of agrarian and proletarian democracy, a force hostile to it gripped the nation and imposed upon it a powerful form against which it was never to succeed in doing more than blindly struggle.  The liberating virus of the Revolution was definitely expunged, and henceforth if it worked at all it had to work against the State, in opposition to the armed and respectable power of the nation."

“In your reaction to an imagined attack on your country or an insult to its government, you draw closer to the herd for protection, you conform in word and deed, and you act together. And you fix your adoring gaze upon the State, with a truly filial look, as upon the Father of the flock, the quasi-personal symbol of the strength of the herd, and the leader and determinant of your definite action and ideas.”

“War is the health of the State, wrote Bourne, and in his full realization of what that meant, he recognized the roots of modern totalitarianism years before the psychoanalysis of fascism.”

“In this conflict between youth and its elders, youth is the incarnation of reason pitted against the rigidity of tradition. Youth puts the remorseless questions to everything that is old and established,—Why?  What is this thing good for?  And when it gets the mumbled, evasive answers of the elders, it applies its own fresh, clean spirit of reason to the institutions, customs, and ideas, and finding them stupid, inane, or poisonous, turns instinctively to overthrow them and build in their place the things with which its visions teem.”

“The sense of insecurity, the desire for protection, sends one’s desire back to the father and mother, with whom is associated the earliest feelings of protection. It is not for nothing that one’s State is still thought of as Father or Motherland, that one’s relation towards it is conceived in terms of family affection... in Uncle Sam we have a symbol of protecting, kindly authority, and in the many Mother-posters of the Red Cross, we see how easily in the more tender functions of war service, the ruling organization is conceived in family terms. A people at war have become in the most literal sense obedient, respectful, trustful children again, full of that naive faith in the all-wisdom and all-power of the adult who takes care of them, imposes his mild but necessary rule upon them and in whom they lose their responsibility and anxieties. In this recrudescence of the child, there is great comfort... the strain of being an independent adult weighs heavily...”

“Randolph Bourne, horrified at the support of the war by so-called liberals and progressives, had insisted that an unconditionally defeated Germany would become a greater menace to European peace; the war itself, he charged, was the only real enemy of American freedom.”

“The American Revolution began with certain latent hopes that it might turn into a genuine break with the State ideal.  The Declaration of Independence announced doctrines that were utterly incompatible not only with the century-old conception of the Divine Right of Kings, but also with the Divine Right of the State.  …  If revolution is justifiable a State may even be criminal sometimes in resisting its own extinction.”