Citations:demolatry


 * 1896: Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu [aut.] and Zénaïde Alexeïevna Ragozin [tr.], The Empire of the Tsars and the Russians, volume 3, page 488 (G.P. Putnam’s Sons)
 * He knows nothing of hero-worship: the Russian spirit, he says, does not much believe in great men. To him, it is the soldier who wins battles; the general has nothing to do with it.✻ [¶] But even while crediting the people, collectively and individually, with every success and honor, he by no means deifies them: He is just as sternly set against demolatry as against hero-worship. And while he exalts the peasant before the man of culture, his portraits of him are not in the least flattered. His pictures of peasant life are not idyls.
 * 1913: Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Politics, pages 103⁽¹⁾ and 152⁽²⁾ (2008 publication)
 * ⁽¹⁾ The people should be supreme, yes, its will should be the law of the land. But it is a caricature of democracy to make it also the law of individual initiative. One thing it is to say that all proposals must ultimately win the acceptance of the majority; it is quite another to propose nothing which is not immediately acceptable. It is as true of the nation as of the body that one leg cannot go forward very far unless the whole body follows. That is a different thing from trying to move both legs forward at the same time. The one is democracy; the other is – demolatry.
 * ⁽²⁾ The one thing that no democrat may assume is that the people are dear good souls, fully competent for their task. The most valuable leaders never assume that. No one, for example, would accuse Karl Marx of disloyalty to workingmen. Yet in 1850 he could write at the demagogues among his friends: “While we draw the attention of the German workman to the undeveloped state of the proletariat in Germany, you flatter the national spirit and the guild prejudices of the German artisans in the grossest manner, a method of procedure without doubt the more popular of the two. Just as the democrats made a sort of fetich of the words, ‘the people,’ so you make one of the word ‘proletariat.’” John Spargo quotes this statement in his “Life.” Marx, we are told, could use phrases like “democratic miasma.” He never seems to have made the mistake of confusing democracy with demolatry.