"Of course, Republicans might yet prove frightening, and were much, if not three-quarters, to blame for every ill insight, they did not deserve the Presidency, never, and yet..."

"... if democracy was the free and fair play of human forces then perhaps the Wasp must now hold the game in his direction for a time. The Left was not ready, the Left was years away from a vision sufficiently complex to give life to the land, the Left had not yet learned to talk across the rugged individualism of the more rugged in America, the Left was still too full of kicks and pot and the freakings of sodium amytol and orgy, the howls of electronics and LSD. The Left could also find room to grow up. If the Left had to live through a species of political exile for four or eight or twelve good years, it might even be right. They might be forced to study what was alive in the conservative dream. For certain the world could not be saved by technology or government or genetics, and much of the Left had that still to learn. So the reporter stood in the center of the American Scene— how the little dramas of America, like birds, seemed to find themselves always in the right nest— and realized he was going through no more than the rearrangement of some intellectual luggage (which indeed every good citizen might be supposed to perform) during these worthy operations of the democratic soul when getting ready to vote."

Norman Mailer, "Miami and the Siege of Chicago: An Informal History of the Republican and Democratic Conventions of 1968."