Michael Keren, "Political Perfectionism and the 'Anti-System' Party," Party Politics, 6 (January 2000), 107-116.

First Paragraph:
In a classical article on Germany, Otto Kirchheimer distinguished between two forms of opposition, the 'loyal opposition', which pursues its goals in harmony with the constitutional requirements of a given system, and the opposition of principle', which indicates 'the desire for a degree of goal displacement incompatible with the constitutional requirements of a given system' (Kirchheimer, 1966: 237). This distinction was called for by the European experience, in which fascist parties on the extreme right and communist parties on the extreme left, as well as some regional separatist parties, played the parliamentary game with the desire to destroy parliamentarism itself. The 'opposition of principle' included those parties and movements whose challenge to the political system exceeded conventional goal differences and threatened the very existence of the system.

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Last Paragraph:
Finally, with popular culture rather than the family, the school or the civil group becoming the main agent of political education and socialization, a perfectionist model of democracy may replace the model set by Locke, Jefferson or de Tocqueville, who not only realized democracy's imperfections but considered them inevitable. They believed that since human needs and desires vary, no political structure could ever satisfy them in a perfect manner. They also did not expect democracy to generate ideal politicians but rather to institute the checks and balances that would tame the behavior of far-from-ideal ones. Yet in a popular culture, an image of the perfect public servant attending an empty parliament chamber is worth a thousand words written by the great thinkers. All over the world, a self-righteous attitude towards democratic politics has developed, manifested in sensational anti-corruption or 'investigating the president' campaigns, which propose superficial solutions to fundamental problems and generate unrealistic expectations about democracy. It may thus be concluded that the danger to democracy may stem no less from political perfectionism than from the imperfections of democracy.