Old insights as the jabber-jaws continue prattling about ’08:

“Is it a trifling mischief, that our population, divided into two almost equal numerical halves, should be every four years … precipitated against each other, with all the animosity, bitterness, revilings, and resentments which now mingle all their bad elements to swell that huge evil of Party Spirit, which all deplore, yet all share, and all contribute to stimulate? That so much time should be wasted, so much capital squandered, so much energy misapplied, so much bad feeling mutually excited, so much demoralization, public and private, engendered?”

— from “A Much-Needed Reform” (April 1865), in the United States Magazine, and Democratic Review