Antidemocratic Quotes

A community is a butcher and a doctor, a minister, a town troublemaker. A "community" is not a bunch of people united by some grievance. That's just self-righteousness
incredibly dangerous and antidemocratic. ~ Fran Lebowitz

So take something that's been happening in recent years: devolution―that is, removing authority from the federal government down to the state governments. Well, in some circumstances, that would be a democratizing move which I would be in favor of―it would be a move away from central authority down to local authority. But that's in abstract circumstances that don't exist. Right now it'll happen because moving decision-making power down to the state level in fact means handing it over to private power. See, huge corporations can influence and dominate the federal government, but even middle-sized corporations can influence state governments and play one state's workforce off against another's by threatening to move production elsewhere unless they get better tax breaks and so on. So under the conditions of existing systems of power, devolution is very antidemocratic; under other systems of much greater equality, devolution could be highly democratic―but these are questions which really can't be discussed in isolation from the society as it actually exists. ~ Noam Chomsky

You're saying the media is dangerous, immoral, and antidemocratic?" "Well . . . yes," Henderson said. "They don't recognize it in themselves, but they're basically criminals. In the classic sense of that word. ~ John Sandford

We begin the path toward defeating Mexico's real adversary, who represents authoritarianism and the worst antidemocratic practice, who represents a return to corruption as a system and impunity as conviction. That adversary is Pena Nieto and his party. ~ Josefina Vazquez Mota

There is something fundamentally antidemocratic about relinquishing control of the public education policy agenda to private foundations run by society's wealthiest people; when the wealthiest of these foundations are joined in common purpose, they represent an unusually powerful force that is beyond the reach of democratic institutions. ~ Diane Ravitch

There is always uncertainty over how a politician with no track record will behave in office, but as we noted earlier, antidemocratic leaders are often identifiable before they come to power. ~ Steven Levitsky

Bureaucracies are inherently antidemocratic. Bureaucrats derive their power from their position in the structure, not from their relations with the people they are supposed to serve. The people are not masters of the bureaucracy, but its clients. ~ Alan Keyes