John Henry Newman on Politics

We could all use a tonic for this political season, and what could be better than the soothing prose of John Henry Newman, whose feast was yesterday? I've noted before some resources from Newman for how to think about legal arguments. And I recently came across an essay (available here to those with JSTOR access) by Alvan Ryan from the Review of Politics in 1945 that nicely pulls together themes from Newman's writings (some of them quite obscure, such as the essay "Who's to Blame?" from his 1872 collection Discussions and Arguments) on politics. Ryan concludes:

If one were to summarize Newman's thought, it might be said that it has four phases: (1) the denial of the excessive claims of the State against the Church; (2) the de facto recognition of cultural and national traditions as determining the mode of operation of the Church in each State; ( 3) the affirmation of the rights of the person against the State, which leads Newman to his distinction between Nation and State, and explains his distrust not only of the tyranny of unregulated State power, but his dislike for radical democracy; (4) the affirmation of the dignity of the person, and the appeal to the dictates of conscience against the extreme advocates of Papal Supremacy, whose views, by the way, cannot be identified with those of the Church. Only by recognizing such a complex of relationships, so Newman held, could just and lasting solutions of political problems be achieved.