Political movements, then, derive their vitality from the displacement of private affects upon public objects, and political crises are complicated by the concurrent reactivation of specific primitive motives. Just how does it happen that the private and primitive drives find their way to political symbols? What are the circumstances which favor the selection of political targets of displacement? Political life is carried on with symbols of the whole. Politics has to do with collective processes and public acts, and so intricate are these processes that with the best of intentions, it is extremely difficult to establish an unambiguous relationship between the symbols of the whole and the processes which they are presumed to designate. To the common run of mankind the reference points of political symbols are remote from daily experience, though they are rendered familiar through constant reiteration. This ambiguity of reference, combined with universality of use, renders the words which signify parties, classes, nations, institutions, policies, and modes of political participation readily available for the displacement of private affects. The manifest, rational differences of opinion become complicated by the play of private motives until the symbol is nothing but a focus for the cumulation of irrelevancies. Since the dialectic of politics is conducted in terms of the whole, the private motives are readily rationalized in terms of collective advantage. Politics, moreover, is the sphere of conflict, and brings out all the vanity and venom, the narcissism and aggression, of the contending parties. It is becoming something of a commonplace that politics is the arena of the irrational. But a more accurate description would be that politics is the process by which the irrational bases of society are brought out into the open. So long as the moral order functions with spontaneous smoothness, there is no questioning the justification of prevailing values. But when the moral order has been devalued and called into question, a sincere and general effort may be made to find a reflectively defensible solution of the resulting conflict. Politics seems to be irrational because it is the only phase of collective life in which society tries to be rational. Its very existence shows that the moral order, with all its irrational and non-rational sanctions, is no longer accepted without a challenge. A political difference is the outcome of a moral crisis, and it terminates in a new moral consensus. Politics is the transition between one unchallenged consensus and the next. It begins in conflict and eventuates in a solution. But the solution is not the “rationally best” solution, but the emotionally satisfactory one. The rational and dialectical phases of politics are subsidiary to the process of redefining an emotional consensus.