Knowledge Quote by Charles Phillips

A lot is being smuggled into the word "guidance". Phillips frames voters as essentially blank slates - "they didn't know anything" - and then treats that ignorance not as a democratic problem to be solved with better information, but as a resource to be managed. The move is rhetorically tidy: it sounds paternal, even civic-minded, while quietly justifying a brokered politics where someone else decides what "the direction to go" should be.

The vagueness does the heavy lifting. "Candidates and things of that sort" blurs the line between policy, personality, and party machinery, as if the details are too messy or too technical for regular people. "That league" remains unnamed but clearly positioned as a gatekeeper: instrumental, directing, steering. The syntax turns political choice into traffic control.

Intent-wise, Phillips seems to be defending an institution - a civic league, a party organization, a community group - as a stabilizing force in a moment when voters were new to the process, newly empowered, or newly targeted. The subtext is more complicated: guidance can mean education, but it can also mean discipline. It can be a community protecting its interests against hostile power, or it can be elites consolidating influence by converting uncertainty into obedience.

Context matters because this is the language of machine politics and "respectable" control. It's an argument for mediation: democracy, but curated. The quote works because it never admits to manipulation; it wraps direction in the softer, more defensible clothing of help.