Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Book One, Part Two, Chapter Two

analogous

comparable in certain respects, typically in a way that makes clearer the nature of the things compared

faction

a group of people with a common political purpose, especially a subgroup of a political party that has interests or opinions different from the rest of the political party

What I call great political parties are those that are attached more to principles than to their consequences; to generalities and not to particular cases; to ideas and not to men. These parties generally have nobler features, more generous passions, more real convictions, a franker and bolder aspect than the others. Particular interest, which always plays the greatest role in political passions, hides more skillfully here under the veil of the public interest; it sometimes even succeeds in evading the regard of those whom it animates and brings to act.

Notes

Small parties, on the contrary, are generally without political faith. As they do not feel themselves elevated and sustained by great objects, their character is stamped with a selfishness that shows openly in each of their acts. They always become heated in a cool way; their language is violent but their course is timid and uncertain. The means that they employ are miserable, as is the very goal they propose for themselves. Hence it is when a time of calm follows a violent revolution, great men seem to disappear all at once and souls withdraw into themselves.

Great parties overturn society, small ones agitate it; the former tear it apart and the latter deprave it; the first sometimes save it by shaking it up, the second always trouble it without profit.

America has had great parties; today they no longer exist….

So in our day, one does not perceive great political parties in the United States….

For want of great parties, the United States swarms with small ones, and public opinion becomes infinitely fragmented over questions of detail….Ambition must succeed in creating parties, for it is difficult to overthrow the one who holds power for the sole reason that someone wants to take his place. All the skill of politicians therefore consists in composing parties: a politician in the United States at first seeks to discern his interest and to see what the analogous interests are that could be grouped around his; afterwards, he busies himself with discovering whether there might not by change exist in the world a doctrine or principle that could suitably be placed at the head of the new association to give it the right to introduce itself and circulate freely….

But when one comes to study carefully the secret instincts that govern factions in America, one readily discovers that most of them are more or less linked to one or the other of the two great parties that have divided men since there have been free societies. As one penetrates the innermost thoughts of those parties more deeply, one perceives that some of them work to narrow the use of public power, the others to extend it.