My personal impression is that Quakers, like all abolitionists, enthusiastically took part in the mental preparation of the Civil War. But when the War came they were perplexed and most of them opted out of it. But this abrupt change of  view couldn't work well, indeed a third of the young men joined Lincoln's army. On the other hand, Quakers were rigorous enough to disown those young men and thus lost a lot of their followers.

Is this historically correct?

What would it mean…

Communism is the name of a Party. Socialism is a certain economical policy (which, in its more radical variants, may be naive and preposterous, but not immoral in itself). The real problem we have to speak about is Bolshevism.

Bolshevism – as different from Communism and Socialism - is a political strategy which is grounded in certain assumptions about reality. It is neither restrained to a…

What's this?

A rightwing Quaker is hard to find.

"Conservative" Quaker means normally that you are a traditionalist in all matters of religion and personal conduct, but not politically. To their honor, a lot of Quakers have been "Libertarians" when this kind of political ideology was fashionable, but where have they gone?

So let's speak about the Left and the Right. These are the names of conflict parties, not of general concepts, and conflict parties can change their…