Politics & Power Quote by David Talbot

The ache in Talbot's line isn’t nostalgia for the 1960s so much as a postmortem of American hope. He frames idealism not as a naive phase, but as a rational response to a moment when mass movements seemed capable of bending history. Then he names the pivot point: assassinations, plural, as political punctuation marks that didn’t just remove leaders but rewired the public’s sense of what was possible. The subtext is that violence didn’t only kill people; it killed trajectories.

Talbot’s phrasing does quiet work. “Frustrated” is almost too polite for what he’s describing, which is why it lands: it mimics the period’s forced composure, the way grief and paranoia got folded into daily civic life. He doesn’t say the establishment was evil; he says it was “fixed,” a word that implies rigging, immobility, and a system built to absorb pressure without changing shape. That choice matters. It captures the dawning realization that protest can be metabolized, reform can be slow-walked, and even moral clarity can be outlasted.

As a journalist, Talbot is also describing a generational education in power: the shift from believing politics is a stage you can storm to suspecting it’s a machine with safeguards against interruption. The line doubles as a thesis for a certain kind of American reporting after the ’60s - less starry-eyed about charisma, more obsessed with institutions, hidden levers, and the costs of trying to move them.