"As for the Republicans — how can one regard
seriously a frightened, greedy, nostalgic huddle of tradesmen and lucky
idlers who shut their eyes to history and science, steel their emotions
against decent human sympathy, cling to sordid and provincial ideals
exalting sheer acquisitiveness and condoning artificial hardship for the
non-materially-shrewd, dwell smugly and sentimentally in a distorted
dream-cosmos of outmoded phrases and principles and attitudes based on
the bygone agricultural-handicraft world, and revel in (consciously or
unconsciously) mendacious assumptions (such as the notion that real
liberty is synonymous with the single detail of unrestricted economic
license or that a rational planning of resource-distribution would
contravene some vague and mystical 'American heritage'…) utterly
contrary to fact and without the slightest foundation in human
experience? Intellectually, the Republican idea deserves the tolerance
and respect one gives to the dead."—Lovecraft in a letter to C. L. Moore, exact date unknown, mid-October 1936
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