Politics & Power Quote by Murray Kempton

A political convention, in Kempton's telling, is democracy at its most theatrical and least flattering: a place designed to manufacture belief while quietly draining it. The line lands because it refuses the usual romance of politics. Conventions are marketed as civic ritual and collective purpose; Kempton flips them into an anti-pilgrimage, where the only thing you reliably take home is disillusionment.

The intent is less to sneer at voters than to indict the machinery that claims to represent them. A convention is choreography: delegates as props, speeches as product launches, platform language as branding copy. By saying you can't come away with "any trace of faith in human nature", Kempton isn’t arguing that people are uniquely vile in convention halls. He's suggesting the system rewards the most human tendencies we least like to admit: ambition dressed as principle, tribal loyalty mistaken for conviction, moral certainty purchased by applause. The phrase "any trace" is the blade twist - not merely diminished faith, but none left, as if the event is engineered to strip it out.

Context matters: Kempton came of age covering mid-century American politics, when smoke-filled pragmatism, machine patronage, and TV-era spectacle began to fuse. Conventions became less deliberation than confirmation, less argument than image management. His cynicism is journalistic, not nihilistic: it's the voice of someone who has watched idealists get processed into slogans, then sold back to the public as inspiration. The wit works because it treats the convention as a truth serum: what’s revealed isn’t policy so much as character under pressure - and the results, he implies, aren’t pretty.