Surely.

Politics is, as it were, the gizzard of society, full of grit and gravel, and the two political parties are its two opposite halves− sometimes split into quarters, it may be, which grind on each other. Not only individuals, but states, have thus a confirmed dyspepsia, which expresses itself, you can imagine by what sort of eloquence.  Thus our life is not altogether a forgetting, but also, alas! to a great extent, a remembering, of that which we should never have been conscious of, certainly not in our waking hours. Why should we not meet, not always as dyspeptics, to tell our had dreams, but sometimes as eupeptics, to congratulate each other on the ever−glorious morning? I do not make an exorbitant demand, surely.

Henry David Thoreau, from "Life without Principle"