... the power of the modern State depends on factional animosity. As Randolph Bourne said, “War is the health of the State.” And that includes the “orderly and procedural” civil war of mutual plunder that characterizes modern democracy. That kind of war too is the health of the State.
By giving its subjects access to the mechanism of “legal plunder” and coercion, the democratic State stimulates and gives free reign to their cupidity and cowardice toward each other. They huddle into “herds” (factions, interest groups, political parties, etc) in order to gain the strength in numbers and unity of purpose necessary to plunder and persecute by proxy, and to defend against like treatment at the hands of enemy herds.