Politics & Power Quote by Robert M. La Follette

War, La Follette implies, is never just a clash of flags; its most reliable engine is a domestic constituency with money to make and power to grab. Calling it a "war party" is a deliberately partisan framing, but not in the shallow, electoral sense. He means a standing coalition inside every nation that treats conflict as policy and profit center: financiers, contractors, expansionists, prestige-seekers, the press when it drifts into cheerleading, and politicians who discover that the emergency state flatters their authority.

The line works because it refuses the comforting myth that war is an occasional, tragic deviation from normal politics. "Every nation" is the dagger: no exceptionalism, no moral alibis. La Follette turns war-making into a predictable institutional reflex. The adjectives are telling. "Commercial" makes violence transactional; bloodshed becomes a market. "Imperialistic" widens the target beyond defense, naming the appetite for territory, resources, and strategic leverage. "Ruthless" signals not just brutality abroad but contempt for constraints at home.

"It tolerates no opposition" is the most contemporary sentence in the quote. La Follette is describing the way wartime consensus gets manufactured: dissent rebranded as disloyalty, procedural checks treated as sabotage, civil liberties made conditional. The subtext is personal and political. As an American progressive and fierce critic of militarism and concentrated capital, he is warning that the first casualty of the war party isn't merely truth; it's democratic permission. The context is a world sliding into total war politics, where the pressure to conform becomes a weapon as potent as any artillery.