And nothing undermines the actual quest for political progress like the sense that it would imply the denial or the repudiation of primal, atavistic, or impulsively unwelcome feelings.
A de Blasio campaign spokesman, Dan Levitan, said the campaign had not known of the spot until a reporter asked about it late Sunday, and he commented: "Nothing undermined our democratic system more than when Speaker Quinn overturned term limits and let Mayor Bloomberg spend $100 million buying four more years".
As the President's Task Force rightly notes, "the public confers legitimacy only on those who they believe are acting in a procedurally just way," and nothing undermines the legitimacy and trust of the public more than the sense that the police can kill members of the community with impunity.
Nothing undermines your credibility faster.
At heart, though, a country where money is given out by the state for nothing undermines the standing of a market economy.
Yet nothing undermines that effort, that historic feminist attempt as disheartening as her followers found it, than supporting the presumptive Republican nominee.
In his view, the very existence of Christianity is a threat to the Kims because "nothing undermines totalitarianism more than the idea that the ruler, like everybody else, is accountable to God".
As absolute rulers understand even today, nothing undermines them like ridicule, and if the French were the first Europeans to have their revolution, it may have been less the work of les philosophes than of Molière, Voltaire, and Beaumarchais, the kings of comedy.
"The idea that if Scotland votes democratically to be independent then the rest of the UK waltzes off with all the rights and Scotland is left with nothing undermines any suggestion that we're an equal partner within the UK at the moment.
Nothing undermines authority like hypocrisy.
While love can be blind, nothing undermines romance more than an obviously obligatory, last-ditch purchase.
