Politics & Power Quote by Groucho Marx

Groucho’s gag lands because it hijacks the pious cadence of democratic ideals and swaps in the grubby reality of party identity. “All people are born alike” nods to the Jeffersonian bloodstream of American self-mythology: equality as a birthright, politics as a shared civic project. Then he snaps the frame shut with “except Republicans and Democrats,” a punchline that treats partisan affiliation like a congenital defect. The joke isn’t just that parties divide us; it’s that we act as if they’re destiny.

The intent is classic Groucho: puncture solemnity, expose hypocrisy, keep moving before anyone can argue back. He’s not writing a treatise against voting blocs so much as mocking the way Americans outsource personality to affiliation. The subtext is sharper than it first appears: the parties claim to represent “the people,” yet they immediately sort the people into tribes that behave like rival species. By phrasing it as a birth condition, he hints at how quickly social environments harden into identity - family, region, class, and media ecosystems turning “choice” into something that feels inherited.

Context matters. Marx’s career runs through the Depression, World War II, and the rise of mass advertising and broadcast politics, when public life increasingly became performance. Groucho understood branding before “brand” was a buzzword; Republicans and Democrats become labels as sticky as toothpaste. The line still works because it flatters no one: it mocks the righteous universalism we claim and the petty team-sports politics we practice, in a single, elegant reversal.