While such groups “may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely, in the course of time and things, to become potent engines by which cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people.”21 It was still hard for Washington to conceive of parties that were not disloyal cabals against duly elected government. A party spirit exists in all types of government, Washington observed, “but in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness and is truly their worst enemy.”22 For Washington, parties weren’t so much expressions of popular
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