Politics & Power Quote by Max Lerner

Lerner’s line lands like a smirk dressed up as civics. It’s not just a gripe about manners; it’s a miniature anatomy of power. Politicians, in theory, are the ones with authority, but in the public theater they’re also the ones who must perform restraint. A columnist gets to be the heckler with a press pass, free to puncture egos in language that would look unhinged coming from someone asking for votes.

The intent is to spotlight an asymmetry that polite society pretends is symmetrical: “free speech” isn’t experienced equally across roles. A politician who unloads on a journalist risks looking thin-skinned, vindictive, or authoritarian - and, practically, invites a days-long news cycle about “attacks on the press.” The columnist can do the rhetorical equivalent of throwing tomatoes because that aggression is rebranded as candor, scrutiny, or “telling it like it is.” Lerner is needling the hypocrisy that lets one class of speaker claim the moral high ground while wielding a sharper knife.

The subtext is also self-aware about the columnist’s impunity. The media’s legitimacy is built on the pose of independence, but the privileges of that pose can drift into license: cruelty as critique, certainty as insight, insinuation as analysis. Lerner wrote in a century when mass-circulation opinion-making was becoming a parallel branch of government - shaping reputations, setting agendas, and policing respectability - without the direct accountability of elections. The punchline is that democracy’s watchdog sometimes gets to bite without ever being bitten back.