Politics & Power Quote by Shirley Hazzard

Hazzard lands the blade where American confidence is most tender: not on power, but on permanence. Calling the fear “great and secret” suggests a nation that performs certainty in public while privately suspecting its own thinness. The phrase “phenomenon rather than a civilization” sets up a devastating contrast. A phenomenon is loud, spectacular, and time-bound: something that happens, then passes, leaving anecdotes and merch. A civilization implies depth and duration: institutions that outlast moods, a culture capable of self-critique, memory, and restraint.

The line works because it reframes the American myth of exceptionalism as a kind of anxiety disorder. America doesn’t just want to win; it wants to mean. Hazzard’s word choice implies that we fear being reducible to our scale (GDP, military reach, cultural export) instead of our substance (art, moral seriousness, civic habits). The “secret” is that the usual national brag points can become evidence against us: dominance can look like novelty, not heritage.

Contextually, Hazzard wrote as an expatriate observer with an eye for how empires narrate themselves. From that angle, “America” is not merely a country but a global event, a media system, a tempo. The subtext is a warning about mistaking motion for maturity: a society addicted to innovation, spectacle, and self-reinvention can find continuity boring, accountability inconvenient, and history optional. Her sentence doesn’t predict collapse; it asks whether we’ve built anything that can survive our own appetite for the new.