"Any temporary abrogation of democratic rights is undertaken in the name of democracy, identified, as it is, with Americanism. Anything more than verbal opposition is at once branded an attack on democracy, which presumably reflects the general consensus. It is seen as Un-American because it goes beyond the prescribed, though ineffective, democratic rules, as they evolved in the United States. Being Un-American, it is perceived as a foreign implant, which could not possibly originate on American soil. While, at first, it was the unassimilated immigrants who were held responsible for all the unrest in the nation, later it was allegiance to social systems other than the American which supposedly carried the germ of discontent into the American fabric. To make the world "safe for democracy" required then the simultaneous pursuit of the internal and of the external enemies of democracy and therefore of American capitalism. Even ordinary wage-struggles were often denounced as the work of foreign agitators, bent on undermining American democracy. Despite the actual insignificance of these political currents, laws were passed against anarchism, syndicalism, and bolshevism. Even the democratic Socialist Party found itself outlawed during World War I; all in the name of American democracy."

-Paul Mattick Sr.