Daily Inspiration Quote by James F. Cooper

Cooper’s line lands like a cold splash of water on the warm bath of democratic self-congratulation. “Party” here isn’t the healthy idea of organized belief; it’s faction as addiction, a machine that has forgotten any purpose beyond its own survival. The bite comes from the stacking of adjectives: “vicious, corrupt and unprofitable.” He’s not satisfied to accuse parties of moral rot (“vicious,” “corrupt”); he adds the accountant’s insult (“unprofitable”), implying that even on the most cynical terms the outcome is wasteful. Politics, in this view, doesn’t merely fail to serve the public good; it fails to serve even the crude standard of competent governance.

The phrase “for the sole purpose” is the dagger. Cooper is describing legislation not as a means to solve problems but as a weaponized gesture, crafted to deny the other side a win. The subtext is psychological: parties become identity tribes, and the thrill of defeat becomes more motivating than the work of building. When “defeating party” is the goal, policy turns into sabotage or spectacle - rules designed to jam the gears, not move the country.

Context matters: Cooper wrote in the young republic’s messy adolescence, amid Jacksonian mass politics, patronage, and the hardening of party infrastructure. As a novelist and a social critic, he’s registering a shift from republican virtue to performative combat. It’s less a timeless lament than a specific warning: once politics is organized around humiliation, legislation will reflect that brutality - and the public will pay for it twice, in both ethics and outcomes.