Politics & Power Quote by Tom Wolfe

Tom Wolfe’s line is a grenade tossed into the polite fiction that ideology is mainly a matter of principle. “A liberal is a conservative who has been arrested” reframes politics as biography: the state touches your body, your wallet, your record, and suddenly the abstractions of “law and order” feel less like civic virtue and more like a blunt instrument. It’s a joke with teeth because it flatters no one. Conservatives are cast as complacent until personally inconvenienced; liberals are demoted from moral visionaries to people reacting to a mugshot.

The intent is classic Wolfe: puncture self-seriousness, expose status anxiety, make “belief” look like fashion with consequences. The subtext is that power is easiest to endorse when it’s disciplining other people. Arrest is the plot twist that swaps the spectator for the protagonist, forcing a new relationship to police, courts, and discretion. Wolfe doesn’t argue that all conservatives will convert, or that liberals are merely self-interested; he suggests that empathy often arrives through collision, not contemplation.

Context matters. Wolfe wrote from a vantage point steeped in late-20th-century American culture wars, where crime politics, protest movements, and the expanding carceral state made “arrest” a common hinge between private life and public ideology. The line plays especially well in a society where encounters with policing are unevenly distributed: as satire, it points to the luxury of thinking punishment is clean, fair, and someone else’s problem.