Politics & Power Quote by Frank Chodorov

Chodorov’s line lands like a cold audit of history: wars end on calendars, but the machinery they justify rarely gets disassembled. The adverb “temporarily” is doing quiet, corrosive work here. It punctures the comforting idea that peace is a stable condition, suggesting instead a cycle: emergency, expansion, normalization, repeat. In that frame, war isn’t just a calamity; it’s an instrument.

The second sentence sharpens into libertarian realism. “Authority acquired” treats power like seized territory, not a moral mandate. And “hangs on” is perfectly chosen diction: not heroic, not legalistic, just sticky. States don’t need to conspire; inertia is enough. Agencies founded to meet a crisis find new missions, taxes become baseline, surveillance tools get repackaged, restrictions quietly persist. The subtext is that citizens are trained to accept this drift because the rationale is always urgent, always couched as protection. Once a government has tasted the permissive politics of fear, it learns how to summon that fear again.

“Political power never abdicates” is the sentence’s bleak punchline, and it’s also a rhetorical trapdoor. Abdication is what kings do, voluntarily surrendering the crown. Chodorov implies modern states have monarchic instincts even when wrapped in democratic ritual: power can be voted on, criticized, reshuffled, but it almost never shrinks itself.

Context matters: writing in the shadow of the 20th century’s total wars and the permanent national-security state they birthed, Chodorov is warning that the real legacy of conflict isn’t rubble abroad but a lasting redefinition of what government is allowed to do at home.