Politics & Power Quote by William Randolph Hearst

Hearst’s line lands like a grin that’s all teeth: patriotism isn’t mocked as a feeling so much as exposed as a costume, conveniently donned when power is on the line. The sting is in the “even.” We’re trained to hear patriot as the highest civic identity; Hearst flips it into a last resort, something a politician becomes only after exhausting the usual bag of tricks. It’s not that public service is impossible. It’s that, in a media-saturated democracy, virtue can be performed as strategy.

Coming from Hearst, the barb carries extra voltage. This is a publisher who helped invent the modern machinery of mass persuasion, then watched politicians learn to speak in its language. His papers thrived on spectacle, outrage, and emotional narrative - the same ingredients that turn “country” into a brand. The subtext is transactional: patriotism sells, and it votes. When election pressure rises, politicians don’t just tout policies; they wrap themselves in flags, invoke threats, and elevate symbols over substance because symbols are faster, stickier, and harder to fact-check.

The quote also slips in a darker confession about the ecosystem Hearst helped build. If patriotism is a career move, it’s because audiences reward it - or at least fail to punish the counterfeit version. Hearst isn’t letting the press off the hook either: when publishers can manufacture patriotic fervor, politicians can outsource their sincerity to headlines. The result is a cynical loop where loyalty to the nation gets measured by volume, not value.