Politics & Power Quote by William Kunstler

It lands like a barbed joke, but the barb isn’t aimed at animals. Kunstler is really talking about styles of politics under pressure: the eager coalition-builder versus the self-possessed outsider. The “dog” liberal is defined by approval-seeking, sniffing for consensus, ready to perform loyalty for a pat on the head. In that framing, liberalism isn’t a set of convictions so much as a temperament: conciliatory, socially attuned, anxious to be liked. The cat, by contrast, refuses the social contract. He doesn’t audition for affection; he assumes a kind of intrinsic legitimacy. That smug autonomy becomes the punchline and the provocation.

Kunstler’s context matters. As a radical lawyer and activist who represented unpopular clients and took positions designed to antagonize the mainstream, he had little use for respectability politics. The line reads as a jab at liberals who treat politics as a popularity contest and mistake “pleasing everybody” for moral seriousness. It’s also a warning about how movements get domesticated: the dog’s reward system trains him to fetch whatever the room throws. The cat’s indifference, however, isn’t automatically virtue; it can shade into self-righteousness and factional purity.

The quote works because it turns an ideology into body language. You can feel the posture. By making liberalism a tail-wag, Kunstler implies that seeking broad comfort can become a form of surrender, while the cat’s cool suggests a politics that can survive being unloved.